Film Review: Unexpected Courage 我們意外的勇氣 (2025) - Taiwan
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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The room has no window. That is the first fact the movie asks you to accept, and it never really lets you forget it. Light does not arrive. Time does not pass in the usual way. What arrives instead is a heartbeat you cannot see, and two people who have been dating for years without ever quite agreeing on what that means.
Shawn Yu’s Unexpected Courage is adapted from his own life, which is both the film’s strength and the source of its occasional softness. Rene Liu plays Le-fu, a veteran talent manager who has spent a career putting out other people’s fires. Hsueh Shih-ling is Po-en, the younger commercial director who loves her and is quietly terrified of the sentence that would follow. They have an age gap, family ghosts, careers that keep them in the same city but rarely in the same hour. Then, on her 45th birthday, the surprise: a pregnancy that her damaged uterus may not be able to carry. She is put to bed. He is put to the test. The film stays in that room with them.
Liu does something difficult and unshowy. She acts while lying down. Most of her performance is breath, eyes, the particular fatigue of a capable woman who can no longer leave the building. There are no speeches about empowerment. There is the small, humiliating work of being waited on, of listening to a heart that is not yet a person and already a demand. Hsueh is equally good at the less sympathetic job: the man who can still walk outside, still go to a location scout, still run at night, and who therefore has to decide whether courage is showing up or whether showing up is just another way of not deciding.
Yu comes from music videos and commercials, and you can feel that training in the way he frames the ward—tight, clean, a little too composed for the mess it contains. The movie is not interested in medical procedural detail so much as in the ethics of waiting. What do you owe a relationship that was never named? What do you owe a child who exists mostly as sound? The film’s answer is modest and, I think, honest: you stay in the room. You listen. You try not to make the other person carry the whole fear.
I have some reservations. The supporting stories of other couples lean toward illustration. A few scenes resolve with a tenderness that feels earned by the actors more than by the writing. And because the story is told from inside a marriage-in-waiting that the director himself survived, it sometimes treats endurance as its own moral. That will move many viewers. It moved me. It will also leave some asking whose courage is being named in the title—hers, his, or the “we” that the film is eager to assemble before the hard questions are finished.
Still. Liu and Hsueh make a couple you believe in the way you believe in people you have actually known: imperfect, a little late, capable of kindness and of stalling. The movie does not shout. It sits with you in a room without a window and asks whether love is a decision you make once or a decision you make every morning when the ceiling is still the same ceiling. That is a good question. Unexpected Courage is a good, incomplete, human answer to it. (Neo, 2026)