HKIFF Film Review: Spare Queens 大分瓶 (2026) - Hong Kong
Reviewed at the 50th Hong Kong International Film Festival 2026
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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There’s a moment about halfway through In “Spare Queens” when Stephy Tang’s character, a bowling alley manager whose best years feel like a distant country, watches Chrissie Chau’s character—a former rival now forced to share her lane—execute a perfect strike. The ball thunders, pins explode, and the scoreboard flashes. Tang doesn’t applaud. She doesn’t sneer. She just stares at the empty pins like they’re the ghosts of every chance she never took. That’s the kind of movie this is: not a loud underdog triumph, but a quiet, neon-lit reckoning with the spares we leave on life’s hardwood.
Tommy Tom, working from a sharp script co-written with Lee Po-chi, takes a sport most of us associate with stale beer and rental shoes and turns it into a surprisingly resonant metaphor for middle-aged survival. Ten-pin bowling—especially in Hong Kong, where space is currency and time is faster—becomes a ritual of geometry and grace. Tom shoots the pinsetters like industrial cathedrals. The clatter of resetting pins becomes a heartbeat. You feel the weight of every frame.
The real engine here is the prickly, magnificent dynamic between Tang and Chau. Tang, weary and grounded, plays the manager trying to save a crumbling alley from developers. Chau, brittle and glamorous, plays the hotshot who walked away years ago. They hate each other with the specificity of people who once knew each other’s weaknesses intimately. When they’re forced to team up, the script wisely avoids the “frenemy” playbook. There’s no montage of them laughing over drinks. Instead, Tom lets their tension breathe—sometimes in silence, sometimes in Cantonese insults that sound like poetry.
Anson Kong does solid work as the earnest younger teammate, a kind of human buffer zone. But In Spare Queens belongs to its women. Watch how Tom uses the “7-10 split”—bowling’s most maddening spare, a gap so wide you might as well walk away—as a visual echo of the spaces between Tang and Chau’s lives. The film never over-explains the metaphor. It trusts you to feel it.
The third-act tournament follows a familiar arc. You’ve seen the slow-motion final roll before. But here’s the difference: when the ball hits its mark, you realize you actually care. Not because the outcome is surprising, but because the journey earned every pin. In Spare Queens is about second chances—not the Hollywood kind, but the messy, hesitant, almost embarrassing ones we don’t think we deserve. It bowls a clean game. And it leaves you wanting another frame. It’s not a strike, but it’s a hell of a spare. It’s also a bittersweet love story between Chau and Tang if only you look close enough. (Neo, 2026)
