By: Lana K. Wilson-Combs
"LEFT-HANDED GIRL" IS WARM, WOBBLY, AND WELL-ACTED
The new movie
"Left-Handed Girl" from filmmaker
Shih Ching Tsou ("Red Rocket") is her first solo directorial outing.
It's a gentle, uneven, but undeniably heartfelt family drama co-written with frequent collaborator
Sean Baker ("Anora").
As a film, it never fully escapes its modest, small-scale design, but it finds an emotional pulse in the way it observes ordinary people stumbling through generational expectations. Tsou steers the story with a careful, lived-in texture, treating Taipei's cramped apartments, bustling street corners, and makeshift marketplace stalls not as backdrops but as pressure cookers for long-simmering family conflicts.
At its core, "Left-Handed Girl" is a character study of a household learning--and often failing--to understand one another. The dynamic between the “wise beyond her years,” I-Jing (a fabulous Nia Ye), her exhausted mother Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai, "Let's Get Rich"), and rebellious older sister I-Ann (Ma) gives the movie its most engaging rhythms.
These women carry resentments, private hurts, and unspoken hopes, and Tsou treats their frictions not entirely as melodrama but as the everyday stuff of survival. When the family relocates to Taipei to be closer to the grandparents, the generational clash becomes both comedic and painful: Grandma (Chao) fusses relentlessly over I-Ann's "slutty" wardrobe.
Grandpa (a wonderfully dry Akio Chen, "Old Fox") is convinced that I-Jing's left-handedness is a mark of the devil. Of course, that's nonsense. I've been left-handed my whole life and have never once felt compelled to steal anything because of it. But little I-Jing begins to internalize his superstition, half-believing that some "devil hand" is making her pocket trinkets from the bustling market stalls. In truth, she simply wants the things she takes, or perhaps the attention that comes with taking them.
The performances go a long way toward keeping "Left-Handed Girl" afloat particularly from its younger cast. Nia Ye is the clear standout, a magnetic presence who gives I-Jing a mix of mischief, tenderness, and bewilderment. Her ability to make even a throwaway line like calling her grandpa "stinky" feels authentic.
Akio Chen brings surprising depth to what could have been a one-note, rigid patriarch. His conviction about the "devil hand" is misguided, even harmful, but Chen plays him with enough wounded dignity that we understand where the fear comes from. Esther K. Chae also brings a welcome quiet authority, adding texture in scenes that might have otherwise felt too thinly sketched.
Still, for all its strengths, "Left-Handed Girl" sometimes struggles to find dramatic momentum. The mother's noodle-stall subplot is charming but underdeveloped; I-Ann's rebellious arc, meanwhile, feels like it peaks too early. Yet the film's softness is also part of its charm.
Tsou and Baker seem more interested in capturing the messiness of family, how people can love each other fiercely and misunderstand each other completely, than in delivering tidy resolutions.
By the time the family must set aside their grievances to help one another out of trouble, the payoff feels modest but earned. It's a moving film, and thanks to the luminous Nia Ye and an ensemble that works hard to fill the quiet spaces, it leaves a warm and welcome pleasantness.
Editor's Note: Be sure to catch my N2Entertainment.net movie talk segment on the Kitty O'Neal Show Fridays now at 5:17 p.m. and 6:47 p.m. on radio station KFBK 93.1 FM and 1530 AM.
Watch This Trailer For
"LEFT-HANDED GIRL"
Lana K. Wilson-Combs is a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association (BFCA), The American Film Institute (AFI), and a Nominating Committee Voting Member for the NAACP Image Awards.
