Mistress Dispeller

NETPAC Award, 2024 Venice Film Festival

A cheating husband. His charming girlfriend. A wife who won’t give up. Enter the mistress dispeller – an undercover professional hired to break up a husband’s affair. In the utterly fascinating and visually operatic documentary MISTRESS DISPELLER, this person is Wang Zhenxi. And filmmaker Elizabeth Lo’s astonishing access to one couple’s real-time wrangling with infidelity – from messy beginning to transcendent end – has resulted in the year’s most unpredictable heist-inflected portrait of love.

The aging Li’s are the couple that still holds hands, plays badminton, and works out together. But privately, they have gotten distant and Mrs. Li suspects Mr. Li’s frequent work meetings are actually rendezvous. Refusing to turn a blind eye, Mrs. Li hires Teacher Wang, a master infiltrator and mistress-whisperer, to pose as a friend, gain the trust of Mr. Li and girlfriend Fei Fei, and break them up. But as MISTRESS DISPELLER takes us from fake identities to husband confessionals, what begins as one wife’s ruthlessly practical way to handle the competition ends in unforeseeable new territory.

This high stakes affair plays against the economic frenzy of China’s intense love industry – a sea of flyers advertising marriageability (“no mortgage!”), awkwardly comic wedding photo shoots, busy matchmaking merchants, even a “Love College” statistics course on happiness. In a world defined by secrecy, Lo’s elaborate process of consent won remarkable vulnerability on screen. But the film’s true revelation is Teacher Wang. In one especially fraught meeting between the impossibly entangled mistress and wife, Wang’s influence is like a soft drizzle, slowly dissolving cultures of winning and losing and redefining what is possible with love.

– Christina Ree