Critic Reviews

This startlingly evocative, complex and confrontational new film is not interested in justice or didacticism.

Here, the same genre tropes that are ordinarily primed for cheap thrills and big twists are bent towards the opposite effect, as the film blurs the line between reality and delusion in order to make audiences question a trauma so disorientingly awful that it might otherwise be easy to dismiss altogether — even for the people who suffer it first-hand.

Nina Wu is a thrillingly complicated sort of corrective, living out the progressive ideal of giving the victim back her story, even when that story, told with lacerating self-criticism and a deep undercurrent of dismay, includes a great deal that falls far short of progressive ideals.

Truth and delusion intermingle within this space, materializing not as spectacle or doubt, but rather as an embodied, if not literalized, study of the ways in which women attempt to intellectually and emotionally make sense of their experiences of exploitation.

Clearly, the director takes great risks off-screen. If only they were as great on the screen.

While his previous drama, The Road to Mandalay, showcased his keen eye for social realism, Nina Wu is suffused with visual poetry – all stark-reds and grainy yellows – and a dream-like (or nightmarish, depending on how you view it) atmosphere. It’s a portrait of a country experiencing significant sociopolitical changes. By focusing on its filmmaking industry, Z takes advantage of the opportunity to experiment visually, thematically, and narratively – at times, to the film’s detriment.

Director Midi Z and his muse (Ke-Xi Wu is in most of his films, including “The Road to Mandalay”) take us on an increasingly fraught and stylized trip down the rabbit hole of “big break” success and the guilt and emotional scars that linger from what Nina might have endured to get there.

Some will say that Nina Wu is a courageous work for exposing the abuse powerless young actresses face when trying to break into an acting career, while others will no doubt feel that, by what it shows, the movie remains part of the problem. As unevenly presented here, it’s a wobbly tightrope.

Timely as it is, this is a film which doesn’t always treat its female characters with the respect that one might hope for, certainly given that it is intended to expose exploitation rather than add to it.