Film Review: She’s Got No Name (Part 1) 园弄·悬案（上） (2025) - China / Hong Kong
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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Hong Kong Veteran Director Peter Chan’s “She’s Got No Name (Part 1)” is the kind of film that arrives with serious intentions and a heavyweight cast, then spends two hours earnestly trying to earn its own running time. It mostly succeeds, but not without some troubling second-act drift. Let me say the good part first: Zhang Ziyi gives a performance of raw, unshowy power. She plays Zhan Zhou, a Shanghai wife arrested in 1945 for dismembering her husband. The film is less a whodunit than a whydunit, and Zhang carries the weight of that why with her eyes alone. You watch her sit in silence—through courtroom testimony, through flashbacks of domestic cruelty—and you feel the slow, terrible math of a woman running out of options.
The production design is magnificent: the cramped tenements of Jiangyuan Alley feel like a pressure cooker where every neighbor is a witness and nobody intervenes. The cinematography, all muted browns and sickly yellows, creates a world without relief. Violent moments land like broken glass. Courtroom scenes feel clinical and cold, designed not for justice but for social performance.
But here's where the film frustrates. Chan has decided to split the story into two parts, and Part 1 suffers from the structural bloat that plagues so many franchise-minded epics. The middle section wanders away from Zhan Zhou to service a large ensemble—Jackson Yee and Zhao Liying do solid, committed work, but they're given subplots that feel like set-up for the sequel rather than organic drama. The legal proceedings circle the same moral arguments without advancing the emotional stakes. By the 90-minute mark, I found myself checking my watch, which is never a good sign in a courtroom thriller.
What saves the film is its final stretch, where Chan remembers his true subject: how the law erases poor women by treating them as either hysterical or guilty. Zhang Ziyi earns every moment of that finale. She makes a forgotten woman unforgettable.
“She’s Got No Name (Part 1)” is ambitious, handsomely mounted, and occasionally brilliant. It's also uneven and incomplete by design. I'll be there for Part 2. But a great movie shouldn't ask you to wait for its second half to feel whole. (Neo, 2026)