HKIFF Film Review: We Are All Strangers 我們不是陌生人 (2026) - Singapore
Reviewed at the 50th Hong Kong International Film Festival 2026
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 9/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2
Support my reviews by buying me a Coffee! https://buymeacoffee.com/neofilmblog
Support our reviews by buying from official DVDs / Blu Rays at NeoFilmShop.com
It is not the job of a film to give us answers. That is for sermons and self-help books. The job of a film is to ask the right questions, and then to sit with us in the silence that follows. Anthony Chen’s “We Are All Strangers,” which opened the 50th Hong Kong International Film Festival with the quiet force of a held breath, asks the most difficult question there is: How do we live with the people we are supposed to love?
This is the third and, I suspect, defining chapter in an informal trilogy Chen has been building for thirteen years. It began with “Ilo Ilo” - a film about a family held together by an outsider, and continued with “Wet Season” about a teacher grasping for connection in a disintegrating life. Now we have this. If you have followed the journey of these two extraordinary actors, Yeo Yann Yann and Koh Jia Ler, from those earlier films to this one, you will feel the weight of time itself pressing against the screen. That is not a gimmick. It is a form of cinematic memory that Chen has earned.
The situation is simple, because life is simple in its cruelties. Boon Kiat (Andi Lim) runs a noodle stall. His son, Junyang (Koh), makes a mistake that young people have been making since time began—an unplanned pregnancy with sweetheart (Regene Lim) and suddenly the fragile architecture of their lives is not enough to contain the fallout. Between them drifts Bee Hwa (Yeo), a “beer auntie” who sells drinks and serves as a kind of gravitational force, pulling them together even as they spin apart.
What strikes you first is the patience. Chen’s camera does not beg for your sympathy. It waits. It watches the steam rise from a pot of broth, and in that steam you see the labor of a man who has built his entire identity on the simple, dignified act of feeding people. It watches the fluorescent lights of a Singapore HDB flat hum, and in that hum you hear the loneliness of a city that has perfected the art of putting people next to each other without ever letting them touch.
This is a film about class, yes, but Chen is too wise to make it a lecture. The poverty here is not the poverty of deprivation—these people have food, they have shelter—but the poverty of margin. The poverty that leaves no room for error. A single unplanned pregnancy is not a moral failing in this world; it is a structural crack that threatens to bring down the entire building.
Yeo Yann Yann has long been one of the most trustworthy actors in cinema, and here she does something extraordinary: she plays a woman who has learned to make herself small. Bee Hwa is a survivalist, and Yeo shows us the cost of that survival in the way she holds her shoulders, the way she calculates every word before it leaves her mouth. There is a scene where she simply sits at a table, not speaking, and you realize you have been watching her for three minutes without once looking away. That is acting.
But the revelation—and it is a revelation, even if we have been watching him for over a decade—is Koh Jia Ler. I remember the little boy in “Ilo Ilo,” all mischief and defiance. Now he is a young man, and the boy is still there, buried somewhere inside a face that has learned to harden itself against disappointment. There is a meta-cinematic ache to watching him that Chen wisely never exploits. He simply lets it exist, and in doing so, creates a kind of private grief for anyone who has followed these films.
The title is “We Are All Strangers,” and Chen means it. Not in the pop-psychology sense that we are all disconnected in the modern world. He means it in the literal, terrifying sense: that the people we share tables with, the people we have known for decades, the people whose blood or no blood we carry—these people remain strangers to us, and we to them. The film’s great insight is that this is not necessarily a failure. Sometimes it is simply the condition of being alive. The work is not to erase that strangeness. The work is to sit across the table from it anyway like the baby calling out “grandma” in a final emotional touch-point.
As an opening film for HKIFF50, it sets a bar that is high for films that will follow. It is not a film that announces itself with grand gestures. It announces itself with a man wiping down a counter at the end of a long day, with a woman counting coins in a back room, with a young man staring at a ceiling or taking a dump and wondering how his life became this. Regene Lim is particularly effective in the final sequences as she sits on a bench eating McDonald, pondering what could’ve been. These are the moments that make up our lives, and Chen has made a film that finally, honestly looks at them.
Anthony Chen has completed his trilogy. He has not gone out with a bang. He has gone out with something much rarer: a lingering, soulful ache that stays with you long after the lights come up, like the memory of a meal shared with someone you used to know, someone you are still trying to know. That is what movies are for. (Neo, 2026)
