Mistress Dispeller (2025)
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Director: Elizabeth Lo Run Time: 94 min. Release Year: 2025 Language: Mandarin
Starring: Wang Zhenxi
Country: China, United States
Language: Mandarin
About the film:
In modern-day China, a covert “mistress-dispeller” named Wang Zhenxi is hired by a wife to end her husband’s affair—using undercover tactics, emotional manipulation, and a complex web of relationships to navigate the delicate terrain of infidelity, shame and reconciliation. Director Elizabeth Lo integrates strikingly intimate access to all parties—the wife, the husband, the mistress and the dispeller—to reveal how love, pragmatism and cultural norms collide in a society where preserving the family, managing face and resisting the spectacle of divorce define the stakes. The film offers a unique, quietly unsettling portrait of intimacy, betrayal and the business of keeping marriages intact.
About the filmmaker:
Elizabeth Lo is a Hong Kong–born documentary filmmaker, cinematographer and producer whose work explores unseen social worlds with compassion and formal elegance. A graduate of NYU Tisch and Stanford, she first gained attention for her documentary Stray (2020), which followed the lives of street dogs in Istanbul, and continued with Mistress Dispeller (2024), a film that offers unprecedented access into a hidden “love-industry” in China. With her films, Lo blends observational intimacy with a sharp cultural lens, illuminating contemporary issues of belonging, relationship dynamics and societal change.
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