Wet Season

Writer-director Chen, along with the two leads, delicately navigates this story, and the result is something deeply humanist and nuanced rather than sensational, though the rainy milieu adds drama to the proceedings.

Chen’s delicate, nuanced portrait of the heartbreaks afflicting a dedicated schoolteacher and dutiful wife is suffused with love and humor, and directed with striking maturity and restraint.

It is easy to see where Wet Season is heading but Chen invests so much in the needs and flaws of the central duo that you want to see how it plays out.

Chen is never blatantly forthright in showing the prejudice at work in Ling’s day-today, allowing it instead to subtly seep into the film; we need only sift the tea leaves.

If you feel like you know where it’s headed, you are probably correct. But while Chen’s refusal to subvert commonplace elements is disappointing, there’s a sharp note of sorrowful, aching understanding running through the protagonists’ shared ordeal.

A student-teacher romance that’s so slow-burn it almost never flares up, Wet Season marks a skillfully observant if somewhat tepid and overwrought sophomore effort from Singaporean director Anthony Chen.

As a woman struggling to define her own narrative, Yeo delivers a layered, heartbreaking performance. But she is ultimately ill-served by both the inertness of the story and Chen’s awkward approach to the material in the final half-hour (no spoilers here).