Left-Handed Girl: a Taiwanese comedy with a wild, whirling sense of momentum

• Reviewed from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival 

Careful the things you say; children will listen. That’s the well-trodden and evocative theme of Shih-Ching Tsou’s debut feature Left Handed Girl – a contemporary drama which wears its fairytale elements fashionably on its sleeves. The film won a prize at Cannes Critics Week and was recently announced as Taiwan’s official Oscar selection; it’s the sort of movie that travels well without betraying its commitments to its home turf. 

The title refers to five-year old I-Jing (Nina Ye), an adorable little girl in thrall to a bizarre notion: that the Devil has somehow possessed her southpaw. The culprit behind this premature existential crisis is I-Jing’s elderly grandfather, who doesn’t realise the consequences of his own poker-faced teasing. (Male obliviousness is a running theme in a movie without much patience for it). 

Operating under what she believes to be satan’s power, I-Jing begins committing increasingly brazen acts of theft, leveraging her burgeoning resourcefulness as a shoplifter against pangs of guilt. Things get worse when her left hand accidentally figures into a legitimate – if comic – tragedy: one with a body count. In the aftermath, we see her eying a cleaver in the kitchen, as if hoping to sever her evil tendencies directly at the source.

The innocent contemplation of inherent vice – and the resulting implication about the value of keeping our hands to ourselves, left or otherwise – serves as a load-bearing subplot in a carefully constructed ensemble comedy. The protagonists are avatars or three successive generations of Taiwanese women. Single mother Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai), barely in her forties, runs a noodle stand in an arcade – twentysomething daughter I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) – a hellraiser entering her twenties with a chip on her provocatively-exposed shoulder blades – minds I-Jing with a mix of love and resentment.   

Shu-Fen’s night market makes for a fascinating labyrinthine backdrop: it’s a haven for eccentric hard-sell artists, and Tso cultivates an atmosphere of gentle, rubbernecking curiosity. In order to help her cash-strapped mother pay the rent, I-Ann takes a job at an adjacent market business, seething all the while at her conjoined responsibilities. She’s so determined to undermine her mother that she hooks up with her married boss at the betel nut stand: a more grown-up (if not exactly mature) variation on I-Jing’s compulsive grabbiness, with a very different – and potentially harrowing – set of consequences. And so it goes, a swift roundelay of compromised, questionable decision-making under the glowing neon sign of late capitalism. For these women, desire and shame are both forms of currency – and, moreover, two sides of the same coin.

Money makes the world go around, and Left-Handed Girl has a fluid, whirling sense of momentum – a quality attributable in part to the participation of Sean Baker, who co-wrote the screenplay in addition to being credited as the sole editor. He and Tso are long-time collaborators – she produced nearly all of his features leading up to Anora (2024) —and it’s obvious they’re on the same wavelength when it comes to storytelling. They like to work up a head of steam, and the roving, mobile camerawork (the cinematography is by Ko-Chin Chen and Tzu-Hao Kao) is a constant source of delight. The problem is that as the movie goes on, the glancing nature of the storytelling gets caught up in the machinery of the plot; the surging musical score only barely conceals the sound of gears grinding.

For instance: the news, doled out early on that Shu-Fen’s siblings are planning an elaborate 60th party for their mother – an imperious tight-fisted matriarch unwilling to loosen her purse strings for her eldest and most embattled daughter – feels off. We can assume that all of the characters’ individual troubles and traumas will be given a nice, convenient spot to converge; ditto a subplot about fake passports, which are just waiting around for idle (left) hands to snatch. That Left-Handed Girl still works as well as it does in spite of its schematism is a testament to Tso’s skill at working with her actors, all of whom are excellent – especially Ye, whose anxious face, captured via a digital camera dancing cheek to cheek with her at key moments, is instantly indelible.