Film Review: Little Red Sweet 紅豆 (2025) - Hong Kong
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7.5/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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A Taste of Memory, A Slice of Home - “Little Red Sweet” is a film of gentle hands. Hands that sort red beans with a lifelong patience. Hands that stir a simmering pot in a rhythm passed down through generations. And hands that reluctantly, inevitably, must let go. In his directorial debut, Hong Kong director Vincent Chow has crafted a tender, bittersweet ode not just to a family, but to a city holding onto its flavor in the face of erasure. While its recipe includes a few generic ingredients, the final dish is nourishing and sincere.
The story is a familiar, almost mythical, setup in Hong Kong cinema: the children of a fading tradition called home to save it. The Cheung family’s dessert shop, “Cheung Hing Kee,” is a haven of sticky sweetness in the changing landscape of Kowloon City. When the matriarch (a beautifully understated Mimi Kung) falls ill, the weight of the wooden ladle falls to her daughter, May, played with weary, resilient grace by Stephy Tang. May is a modern woman—a flight attendant—whose dreams of the wider world are tethered by the stubborn gravity of her father, played by the ever-formidable Simon Yam.
Yam’s performance is the film’s complex anchor. He is a man whose love language is criticism and whose pride is as unyielding as the rock sugar he dissolves. His relationship with May is the core conflict, a simmering pot of unspoken gratitude and generational resentment. The film wisely critiques the gendered expectations of this dynamic; her brother (Jeffrey Ngai) floats on the periphery, his obligations lighter, his failures more easily forgiven. May’s burden is her birthright.
Chow and his cinematographer bathe the film in a warm, honeyed light. It feels like flipping through a cherished, slightly faded photo album. The bustling streets and cramped shop are not just locations, but characters—places steeped in the steam of sweet soups and unspoken history. This is where the film truly sings: in the quiet, detailed moments of culinary ritual. The washing of beans, the precise control of fire, the patient stirring. A scene where Yam’s father silently teaches May the exacting process is one of the year’s most potent moments of nonverbal storytelling—a passing of the torch, a sharing of a soul.
The film’s weaknesses, arise when it steps away from the kitchen. A romantic subplot for May feels like a narrative obligation, a sidelong glance at a life she might have had, but it distracts from the richer, more fraught love story between father and daughter. At 90 minutes, one wishes for a slightly longer simmer to allow a few secondary characters to develop more depth.
But these are minor quibbles in a film so fundamentally kind and perceptive. “Little Red Sweet” understands that food is memory made edible. It is a film about the last guardians of taste, the people who, as a poignant line in the film states, “help people retain their memories through their taste buds... this way, perhaps, the history and identity of Hong Kong can live on.”
It may follow a well-worn path, but “Little Red Sweet” walks it with authenticity and heart. It’s a film that doesn’t shout, but whispers—a whisper of simmering beans, of murmured family arguments, and of a city’s enduring spirit. It leaves you not with a dramatic climax, but with a lingering, sweet, and slightly melancholy aftertaste. (Neo, 2026)