Nina Wu (2019)

I didn't have much to say about Nina Wu (灼人秘密) after I saw it – back in late September. I watched it with my unseen movie club, and it's a film about the film industry in Taiwan (but also, really, the film industry everywhere). Midi Z's movie is a kind of psychological thriller where we don't always know what's really happening, whether or not something is a dream or not, etc. But the film's end really does bring everything all together, and it makes things quite clear.

The performances in this film are also just excellent.

The thing for me is that I didn't really enjoy watching this very much. It's a hard film to deal with, and it doesn't offer a lot of room to breathe or space for joy. (This is, I suppose, a weird thing to complain about, but I guess what I'm saying is Nina Wu felt a little too relentless. One excellent thing in the film, to my mind, is the way it uses queerness as a kind of space of freedom or possibility. I was into that.

Nina Wu was released in Taiwan in 2019 and the U.S. in 2020.