Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl is one of those films that feels like it has been living inside someone for years, collecting memories, secrets, and tiny observations until the moment it can finally spill onto the screen. It’s rooted in Tsou’s own childhood but plays like something more universal: a story about the emotional weather inside a family of women, and how each generation carries pieces of the past.
I-Jing, played with raw, luminous honesty by Nina Ye, is at the center of it all. The film follows the young child as she begins to understand the world around her; her mother’s (Janel Tsai) exhaustion and sacrifice, her sister’s (Shih-Yuan Ma) carefully hidden fears, the way adults do things that don’t always make sense until you’re old enough to see what they were trying to protect you from.
I-Jing believes she has a “devil hand,” she is left-handed, a part of herself she doesn’t quite understand. The film uses this belief as a quiet metaphor for the shame and strangeness we inherit. Every woman in this family has something odd or unspoken about her. They lie for one another, hide truths to keep the peace, and sometimes pass down burdens because they don’t know what else to do. Instead of judging them, Tsou approaches them with so much empathy that even their mistakes feel like acts of love. There’s a beautiful steadiness to the way she shows women picking up responsibility simply because they’re the ones who can bear it.
What surprised me most on my first watch was just how warm this movie is. There’s heartbreak, poverty, and generational guilt woven into the story, but Tsou films it with a kind of wonder. You feel like you’re discovering Taipei at the same time I-Jing is, the restaurants, the cramped kitchens, the steam rising off bowls of noodles, the chaos of night markets that pull you in with their neon greens, electric blues, and sunlit yellows. I remember finishing the film for the first time at a festival and immediately going out to satisfy this newfound craving for noodles. The movie shoots food like a love letter, wanting to make you feel full.
The production’s bare-bones style is key to that immersion. Shot on an iPhone with a tiny crew, the camera moves through real streets and markets with a loose, lived-in energy. Scenes feel overheard rather than staged. You can sense Tsou’s desire for authenticity, like she wants you to see Taipei the way a child might, overwhelmed but enchanted. It also helps that the score is so whimsical, almost mischievous at times, giving the film a buoyancy that counters its heavier themes.
Left-Handed Girl’s high point is a family birthday banquet that turns into a tense, messy, hilarious swirl of overlapping conversations and half-revealed truths. Tsou directs with such confidence that it becomes a mini-movie inside the movie, capturing everything Left-Handed Girl is trying to say about loyalty, pressure, and the unpredictable rhythm of family gatherings. At times, it plays like a scene from a reality TV show. Imagine The Real Housewives of Taipei, if that were a thing, but grounded in such authenticity that it’s both chaotic and believable.
And yes, the long creative history between Tsou and Sean Baker is felt, not in a derivative way, but in the emotional DNA. The editing has a looseness reminiscent of The Florida Project (2017), and the kids here genuinely feel like they’d be friends with Moonee and Scooty. Both films circle young girls growing up on the margins, surrounded by adults doing their best and sometimes falling short. But Left-Handed Girl is unmistakably Tsou’s. Her voice is gentler, more dreamlike, more attuned to the specific ways Taiwanese families protect (and sometimes unintentionally hurt) their daughters.
In the end, the film leaves you with a soft ache, not from sadness, but from recognition. Tsou captures the feeling of looking back on childhood and finally understanding the invisible labor and hidden emotions of the people who raised you. It’s a film about girls figuring out who they are while carrying the weight of the women who came before them. And it’s one of the most personal, empathetic, quietly magical films of the year.
Review Courtesy of Jake Fittipaldi
Feature Image Credit to Netflix