The Brooklyn Rail

A teardrop glides down the cheek of a steely, exquisite face of a woman in the mirror. She closes her eyes. Her short hair is blown and ruffled by a hairdryer and hands of a hairdresser. Her head stays, cooperatively, perfectly still, her fine brows and makeup almost masking the tremors of fine muscles underneath, or stopping a sigh from escaping her wine-colored lips as her sorrow and pride battle for the expanse of that fine-grained, softly wrinkled face while a sweeping Italian opera crescendoes.

This is how we first meet Mrs. Li, a middle-aged Chinese woman whose preoccupied and tumultuous interior life is felicitously revealed in the breathtaking opening shot of Mistress Dispeller (2024), Elizabeth Lo’s second feature-length documentary. What bothers Mrs. Li is soon revealed: her longtime loving husband is having an affair. Dumbfounded but reluctant to confront him or divorce him for the sake of their daughter, she recruits the help of Teacher Wang, a professional “mistress dispeller,” to break up the affair and restore to the family monogamous harmony. It is one of the more bizarre professions that have emerged in China as a result of the country’s economic boom and rapid social change, a profession that is neither recognized officially nor banned. It is easy to see how, in lesser directorial hands, a film with such a title could give in to the profession’s salacious attraction and the case’s scandalous appeal. Instead, Mistress Dispeller is an intimate study of the mechanism of mistress dispelling and a tender, compassionate portrait of a love triangle caught up in the complexity of love, family, duty, and desires.

The past few years have seen a spate of films wrestling with women’s place in contemporary China risen to international acclaim through wide festival runs and theatrical releases. From Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang’s personal investigation One Child Nation (2019) and Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s narrative drama Stonewalling (2022), to Violet Du Feng’s vérité documentary Hidden Letters (2023) and Alan Zhang’s experimental docufiction This Woman (2025), these works scrutinize with a rich arsenal of aesthetic tools the many facets of China’s social and cultural life that disproportionately and often disadvantageously affect women’s life. Mistress Dispeller adds to this growing canon, emerging as the most surprising and literary entry.

The film unfolds linearly as we follow Teacher Wang working through Mrs. Li’s case from beginning to end. Meanwhile, we get to spend time, respectively, with the husband Mr. Li, Mrs. Li, and Fei Fei, the young, beautiful mistress with long, dark silky hair. On many levels, watching Mistress Dispeller produces the feeling akin to reading a great modernist novel. The characters do things and move through spaces under Lo’s composed, observational lens, but the dramatic tension and rhythmic flow derive from their inner soliloquies. Sometimes this is achieved through intimate interviews superimposed over impressionistic footage, such as when the camera follows Fei Fei back to her apartment in the neighboring city, Zhengzhou, watching her go about her daily business while her voice-over goes, “I can’t tell anyone about this. How can I say that I found someone who treats me well, but he’s not mine?” At other times, the interiority is channeled through a prolonged few seconds with the characters framed in lush, resonant shots. For example, in an early scene after Mr. and Mrs. Li have a tense dinner at home, Mr. Li refuses tea offered by Mrs. Li because he is going out. He walks from the living room at the right of the frame to the door, which is composed squarely at the center of the wide shot behind vertical bars of a room divider. He leaves; meanwhile, a reflection of Mrs. Li appears in a full-bodied mirror to the left of the frame, her elbow leaning against a vase stand as she gazes towards the door that just shut. The disjuncture between the quinquagenarian woman and her physical reality made ever so palpable by the layered, evocative composition.

Much of Lo’s ability to dive into the psychology of all characters in a romantic, emotional mess is due to the film’s alignment with the incredible work of Teacher Wang—and she is always at work. Always unfazed, even-tempered, and perfectly cool, but also personable enough to excel at her job that practically functions as both a private detective and psychotherapist, she smoothly infiltrates the lives of Mr. Li and Fei Fei under false identities and becomes their confidante to gather clues and determine motives, from spa time hangout to badminton matches. “Who I am and what I do is of zero importance. I’m just a vessel in their lives,” Teacher Wang says, responding to a trainee who asks if she will eventually reveal her true identity to the mistresses. “I only need to tell them the solution.” In an intimate one-on-one conversation Teacher Wang has with Fei Fei at a tea room during a visit to Zhengzhou, Teacher Wang shows incredible understanding and empathy for Fei Fei and her situation as a single woman drifting and striving alone in a big city. It’s not that Fei Fei never has doubts, but eventually she chooses to accept Teacher Wang in a stunning finale. What’s most magical about Teacher Wang’s method is how deftly it toes the thin line between deception and persuasion, solving the knotty situation like it’s an organic process, winning hearts step-by-step.

It’s a testament to Lo and her team’s exceptional ability to connect with unlikely subjects—which have included stray dogs in Turkey in her highly acclaimed feature directorial debut Stray (2020)—that they not only were able to convince all parties to share their lives so candidly and openly during a vulnerable moment of crisis, but also continued to gain their trust and consent to release the film, especially given how private Chinese people tend to be. In interviews, Lo has shared that it took the crew three years to find Mrs. Li’s case, during which time they had been following Teacher Wang and filming with numerous other couples. Given deception is an inherent part of the dispelling process, and the crew has rightfully chosen to present the process and not ruin the experience for the audience as well as those involved, they only disclosed the crew’s true intent to Fei Fei and the husband after the conclusion of the case, and all agreed to continued participation in the film on condition that it not be released publicly in China—a disclosure Lo includes in intertitles at the start of the film, correctly anticipating potential outcries against the film’s ethics.

What would the film look like if any of the characters withdrew their consent at the last minute? In interviews, Lo has mentioned this possibility and said the crew was ready to pivot the film into a more diffuse look at the love industry in China. Traces of this alternate project can be gleaned from the existing version, where beautiful, moody vignettes shot in slow-motion of different scenes from the love industry weave in throughout the film. Noteworthily, the only sequence that is presented in a similar manner that is directly related to the main characters is the scene when we see Mr. Li and Fei Fei in the same frame together as they enjoy a hotpot in a private dining room. The similarity in the visual language between the crowded spaces of public matchmaking, love-hunting and vows-giving, and this intimate scene of sharing a meal suggests an implicit parallel: regardless of the arrangement’s commonality or mundanity, they are all, ultimately, transient and liminal spaces serving a symbolic function rather than sustaining its specific constituents. In this poetic sleight of hand, the film casts a slant commentary in an otherwise dispassionate story about a fraught romantic triangle, if only for the duration of the film, allowing us to suspend our judgments and expand our circles of empathy.