Film Review: Left-Handed Girl 左撇子女孩 (2025) - Taiwan
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 9/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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There is a moment early in Left-Handed Girl when a little girl is told, quite calmly, that her left hand belongs to the devil. The words are spoken without theatrical malice, almost as a piece of inherited household wisdom. And yet they land with the force of a curse. From that point on, the film watches what happens when a child internalizes a superstition and begins to treat part of her own body as suspect.
Shih-Ching Tsou’s debut feature is a quiet marvel of observation. It follows a single mother and her two daughters as they try to restart their lives in Taipei, running a modest noodle stall in a night market that never quite sleeps. The older daughter is restless and half-grown, already tangled in adult compromises. The younger one, I-Jing, is still open to the world, which makes her vulnerability to her grandfather’s words all the more piercing. What begins as a story of economic struggle gradually reveals itself as something deeper: a study of how shame is passed down, how women in particular are taught to police themselves, and how a family can love one another while still wounding each other in the name of tradition.
Tsou, working with her longtime collaborator Sean Baker, shoots Taipei with an intimate, almost tactile energy. The night market is not just a backdrop; it becomes a living organism of steam, neon, chatter, and small transactions. The camera stays close to the characters without becoming intrusive, finding poetry in the ordinary—the way a child’s hand reaches for something she has been told she should not want, the exhaustion that settles into a mother’s shoulders after another long night, the careful performances people put on for relatives they both need and resent.
Nina Ye, as the five-year-old I-Jing, is extraordinary. She carries the film’s emotional center without ever seeming to “act.” Her face registers wonder, confusion, and the slow, private negotiation with guilt that adults so often fail to notice in children. Janel Tsai and Ma Shih-Yuan are equally fine as the mother and older sister, each navigating their own versions of constraint and rebellion. The film trusts these performances enough to let silences and small gestures do the heavy lifting.
What elevates Left-Handed Girl is its refusal to simplify. It understands that superstition and patriarchy are rarely pure villains; they are often the language through which people express care, fear, and the desire for order. The “devil’s hand” becomes a quiet metaphor for every part of ourselves we have been taught to distrust. The film’s greatest strength is its compassion: it looks at flawed people trying, imperfectly, to hold a family together and does not rush to judge them.
Tsou has made a film that feels both specific to Taiwan and strangely universal. It is funny in places, painful in others, and finally quite moving. By the end, the question is no longer whether the left hand is cursed. It is whether any of us can learn to inhabit our own bodies—and our own histories—without apology. (Neo, 2026)