Elizabeth Lo’s “Mistress Dispeller” (2025) opens with an instant stab. Mrs. Li gets a new haircut and her husband doesn’t even notice it. He’s been distracted for a while, growing distant. The love between them, once held as exemplary in their neighbourhood, is now freezing over as his interest and attachment fade away. When she discovers his affair, she baulks at directly confronting him. Instead, she hires a ‘mistress dispeller’, a phenomenon in China and someone who immerses themselves in the situation to terminate the affair and turn the marriage back to how it was originally.
Even as Mrs. Li talks about the heartbreaking reality of her husband’s cheating, she can’t help but praise his cooking to Wang, the mistress dispeller. From being known as a couple who held hands on the streets, they have diverged. She says how she thought she could entrust her life to him. Wang comes in to bring about the return of the husband to Mrs. Li’s side. It doesn’t seem to matter whether he still wants to be with her, but as Wang investigates, deeper complexities emerge.
The camera acts like a fly on the wall, the crew’s unwavering presence interrogated only once by Wang towards a critical final stage. The access here is astonishing, as Lo threads you into observing Wang’s masterfully tactful, perceptive coordination of a matter as thorny, hurting and emotionally abrasive as this. Wang is introduced to the husband as Mrs. Li’s friend, then to the mistress as his cousin. She starts to extract information and guide the two through badminton matches and manicure sessions. Every step is carefully orchestrated. A key element of the film’s intrigue is its rawness—an early disclaimer assures viewers that everything is unscripted.
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Belying the expansion of perspective are also compassion and probing engagement. As is reiterated frequently in the film, there’s no right or wrong in the situation. The human heart is messier, prone to recklessness and self-destructive urges and yet a thrusting urge to have things undisturbed by transgression. Lines are crossed with varying degrees of each other’s awareness of the situation. There’s deception directed seemingly with a view of everyone’s best interests. Mrs. Li is the client whose insistence on wresting back her husband enables Wang to step in. The latter asserts that she must ‘organically inject herself’ into the family. Who she is holds no importance, she adds, her being only a ‘vessel’ in the trio’s lives.
The space of confession Lo manages to capture is so intimate and unguarded that it will take your breath away. Amidst mundanity, Lo weaves in lyricism, unfolding in swoony slow-motion. A break from the heated circumstances, it’s an offering for moments of pause, reaching for the joy in a shared meal. Elsewhere, you get the city itself, countless myriad stories surging.
There are so many unknown narratives to encounter, with which to reorient an understanding. “Mistress Dispeller” foregrounds empathy arcing across all sides the situation can have, permeable to what each has to say. Yes, Wang maintains to Mrs. Li that the mission is to make the husband return to the marriage of his own volition, that the mistress must be made to feel abandoned. That the mistress cannot see a viable future with him is crucial. The task is ‘like war’, Wang sums up, you either win or lose completely.
But the film is wise enough to open out into exploring, examining varied psychologies, individual wishes and impulses of all the three. Wang’s sharp, singular pursuit is balanced by an ability to pierce into each stakeholder. Mr. Li’s quandary is that he doesn’t want a divorce, nor does he wish to leave the girl, Fei Fei. He struggles with talking about it, facing it head-on. Wang is searching for the weaknesses, motivations, working as a conduit to reflect both Mr. Li and Fei Fei’s capacity for sustaining their relationship. Wang stresses that while the wife in such a situation may initially earn your sympathy, it’s usually the mistress who’s in the most painful position.
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Wang insinuates to Fei Fei the mistress and her tendency to gravitate to complicated setups. The mistress is one who often feels like she doesn’t deserve ‘complete love.’ Fei didn’t expect the relationship with Mr. Li to last this long. Working with editor Charlotte Munch Bengtsen, Lo laces together a consistently compelling narrative that always prioritizes an empathetic, capacious perspective above lurid prying. In many ways, the film acts like the ultimate intrusion, but it’s testament to Lo’s mesmerising skill that you don’t spot a speck of judgment or a desire to manipulate and coerce.
“Mistress Dispeller” is suffused with wistful candour, peering into the culturally enforced ideals of marriage, ruptures therein, and the chafing against any straying. With an exquisite, sweeping soundtrack that ranges from Puccini to Odezenne and evokes a swell of emotion, the film wends to an extraordinary encounter between the wife and the mistress. The aching humanity of this film is perhaps eclipsed only by its keen emotional intelligence.
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