Film Review: Someone Like Me 像我這樣的愛情 (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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Here is a film that dares to ask a question most movies won't even whisper: What does desire look like when your body has been declared off-limits by a world that claims to care about you?
Tam Wai-ching's "Someone Like Me" is not the weepy, uplift-for-the-able-bodied exercise its premise might suggest. No, this is something thornier and more valuable—a Hong Kong social-realist drama that treats its protagonist's search for sexual autonomy with the same unblinking seriousness it would afford any other human right. And in Fish Liew's ferocious, career-defining performance, we see a woman trapped not just by cerebral palsy, but by the suffocating love of a mother who has decided that protection means control.
Liew plays Ah Mui, a young woman whose physical limitations have long been used as an excuse to erase her agency. Her mother hovers like a warden, and the specter of a forced hysterectomy—presented not as melodrama but as a chillingly plausible threat—hangs over every scene. When Ah Mui seeks out a sexual surrogate (Carlos Chan, quiet and haunted beneath his professional mask), the film earns its most uncomfortable power: watching two strangers navigate the minefield between genuine intimacy, pity, and the clinical transaction that brought them together.
Chan's Ken is the film's weakest link, not because he's bad—he's not—but because his backstory arrives with the neatness of a screenplay convenience. We sense the loneliness behind his eyes, but the movie lets him off the hook too easily. Still, his tentative, fumbling chemistry with Liew feels painfully real. These are not movie stars pretending to be awkward; these are two people discovering that human touch is never just touch.
Tam directs with a claustrophobic precision. Tight frames, muted grays, the constant sense of walls pressing inward. When Ah Mui finally escapes into open air, the liberation is almost unbearable—not because the film has been miserablist, but because it has refused to sentimentalize her cage. The second act drags, repeating arguments that landed the first time. But Liew's eyes—fierce, terrified, defiant—never let you look away.
"Someone Like Me" earns its marks because it understands something essential: Dignity is not about being inspirational. It's about being allowed to be messy, contradictory, sexually hungry, and utterly, unmistakably alive. The film doesn't ask for your tears. It asks for your attention. And it deserves it. (Neo, 2026)