'Girl' Offers a Raw, Bleak Chronicle of Taiwanese Adolescence in Shu Qi’s Directorial Debut

The celebrated Taiwanese actress Shu Qi is recognized internationally by distinct cinematic audiences: either for her mesmerizing presence in the arthouse films of master director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, such as Millennium Mambo, Three Times, and The Assassin, or by action film aficionados who appreciate her versatile skills in comedy and stunt work, seen in movies like The Transporter and Jackie Chan’s Chinese Zodiac. Regardless of the context, once a viewer encounters Shu on screen, her impact is difficult to forget.

Now, the 49-year-old star has transitioned behind the lens to make her feature directorial debut with Girl (Nühai), delivering a deeply subjective and often jarring portrayal of a teenager navigating life in the 1980s. The film is impressively acted but is also structurally unwieldy and, at times, noticeably under-edited. It offers a raw, unsparing look at alcoholism, poverty, and domestic abuse—a canvas significantly bleaker than any project in which Shu herself has starred. The actress deserves considerable credit for daring to create such a bravely bleak picture, although its uncompromising nature makes it unlikely that the Venice premiere will secure wide distribution.

The palpable influence of Hou Hsiao-Hsien is evident in the movie’s immersive, enigmatic atmosphere, which immediately plunges the audience into a working-class Taiwanese household perpetually struggling with the threat of violence. The narrative is largely filtered through the perspective of Li Hsiao-Lee (Bai Xiao-Ying), a taciturn adolescent who takes on the responsibility of caring for her younger sister (Lai Yu-Fei). At school, Hsiao-Lee keeps to herself, often finding refuge in the infirmary rather than the classroom.

At home, she works to evade her overtly hostile and moody mother, Chuan (Taiwanese singer 9m88), who works days at a hair salon while handcrafting fake flower bouquets at night to supplement their meager income. Most critically, Hsiao-Lee maintains distance from her father, Chiang (Roy Chiu), an auto mechanic who routinely stumbles into the apartment dead drunk after work, ready to initiate a fight or commit far worse acts.

Shu dedicates substantial screen time to painting this sordid tableau of a broken family life. The film functions less as a classic narrative and more as a languid coming-of-age chronicle, periodically punctuated by sudden, violent outbursts of brutality and cruelty. Cinematographer Yu Jing-Pin, who shoots scenes primarily in wide or medium shots that occasionally shift to Hsiao-Lee’s harrowing point-of-view, depicts a world seemingly devoid of color or hope. This oppressive atmosphere is enhanced by the set designs of Huang Mei-Ching and Tu Shuo-Feng, which consistently underscore the family’s sad, impoverished existence.

The film can, at times, feel slow-moving without much narrative momentum, effectively trapping the viewer in the gloomy apartment. Hsiao-Lee is constantly punished by her mother while living in nightmarish fear of a father who appears to be sexually abusing her. Shu allows these home scenes to play out in their painful entirety, seeming uncut in several instances. One particularly unbearable sequence shows Chiang returning home angry during the middle of the day and brutally raping Chuan in their bedroom.

Even with its artful construction and gripping performances—9m88 and Chiu are disturbingly convincing as two of the meanest parents ever depicted in an arthouse film—Girl can be a tedious experience to endure, particularly during its early sections. The tone shifts toward a lighter, or at least a more hopeful, direction when Hsiao-Lee crosses paths with Li Li-Li (Audrey Lin), a rebellious Taiwanese-American classmate who immediately takes a liking to the quiet girl.

At this point, both Hsiao-Lee’s life and the film’s perspective expand toward something more promising, even as significant turmoil—including another unbearable scene where Chiang nearly strangles Chuan to death—continues back on the home front. One of the film’s best sequences involves the two teens skipping school, shoplifting denim skirts, and visiting a video club equipped with private viewing booths. The establishment bears a striking resemblance to a sleazy peep show venue and may indeed be one. However, Shu emphasizes how the space represents not only cultural freedom (the girls smoke cigarettes and dance to pop music) but also a personal emancipation, allowing Hsiao-Lee to momentarily escape the oppression of her home life.

Scattered elliptical flashbacks provide glimpses into the tough childhood Chuan endured before becoming a mother, highlighting a cycle of poverty and violence that has continued unbroken into the present generation. “Life is easier for kids nowadays,” Chuan remarks in yet another dig at her daughter, a statement that may hold a kernel of truth when compared to the horrors the mother experienced in her own past.

Girl is unrelenting in its vision of a society, or at least this particular family unit, dominated by abusive men who punish the women in their lives, causing them to in turn become abusive figures themselves. The only possible solution for an innocent figure like Hsiao-Lee is to somehow find a way out of this disastrous situation, and the film’s most moving and unexpected twist is that the necessary exit plan does not ultimately originate with her.

For the viewer, this eventual shift in perspective arrives perhaps too late. While Shu Qi has undeniably crafted an honest and courageous portrait of fractured adolescence and domestic despair, the director struggles to successfully translate these elements into a compelling dramatic structure. Shu appears to take stylistic cues from Hou Hsiao-Hsien, particularly in the way certain scenes play out fully from a single, static angle, but she fails to achieve the same artful distance toward her sensitive subject matter. The result is a film that successfully shakes and upsets the viewer, yet never quite manages to engross them as deeply as its powerful material suggests it should.