Film Review: Wish You Well 非传统浪漫关系 (2026) - China
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7.5/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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A bracingly honest anti-rom-com that knows love is a mess and likes it anyway. There’s a moment about forty minutes into Liang Wenzhe’s “Wish You Well” where Zhu Yanmanzi’s character, relationship blogger Zhu Junhao, catches herself actually feeling something real amid the chaos of her post-divorce experiment. The camera holds on her face for just a beat longer than comfort allows. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t smile. She just stops performing. And in that silence, Liang delivers something rarer than any Hollywood meet-cute: the truth.
This is not a traditional romance. This is a post-romance, a film that looks at the wreckage of modern connection and asks whether you can build something honest from the debris without pretending the debris isn’t there. The setup is delightfully absurd: two bitter exes — a sharp-tongued emotional blogger (Zhu Yanmanzi) and a civil affairs bureau worker who handles marriage and divorce paperwork (Ren Bin) — agree to set each other up on dates as they try to move on. What starts as a mutual matchmaking pact quickly spirals into awkward suitors, resurfacing exes, and forced reckonings with what they actually want.
Liang directs with a novelist’s patience and a cynic’s bruised hope. Zhu and Ren share the kind of chemistry that comes from actors who understand that fighting and flirting are the same muscle. Their banter snaps and crackles, filled with the specific Mandarin slang of anxious thirty-somethings navigating algorithm-driven hearts and urban burnout. Ren does wounded defensiveness beautifully, but this is Zhu’s film. She plays a woman whose public persona as a relationship influencer masks a private life held together with caffeine and avoidance. Watch how her posture changes between her performative video shoots and her raw, unscripted conversations.
The cinematography earns its metaphors: early scenes are all cool blues, sterile apartment whites, and the geometry of isolation. As emotional walls crack, the palette warms. It’s not subtle, but it’s earned.
Where the film stumbles is in its second-act detours. The parade of eccentric dates and side characters — desperate, funny, occasionally grotesque — sometimes overstays its welcome, feeling like sketches from a sharper TV show. And the ending, while admirably cliché-resistant, ties a bow that feels just slightly too neat for the messy gift box Liang spent ninety minutes wrapping.
But “Wish You Well” earns its marks. It’s too smart to pretend love conquers all, too humane to pretend love conquers nothing. In an age of romantic comedies terrified of actual adults, Liang has made something that trusts you to handle the complications — and the quiet empowerment of choosing yourself along the way. That alone is worth the price of admission. (Neo, 2026)