It’s not taking anything away from director Tsou Shih-ching to point out that her debut feature was co-written, co-produced, and edited by Sean Baker, whose last movie, Anora, swept the Oscars in 2025. There’s some Baker DNA in Left-Handed Girl, from the iPhone cinematography to the focus on women living at the margins of whatever social milieu they inhabit, but that said, Left-Handed Girl is a better film than Anora or maybe any other Baker movie except The Florida Project. Tsou has been assistant director on many of Baker’s films, so in a sense it’s perhaps better to think of their work as a joint enterprise. Tsou, who lives in the U.S. but grew up in Taiwan, sets her movie in Taipei and obviously knows the city like the back of her hand. It opens with an assured montage of shots of a small rental truck entering the city by highway. The truck contains a family: the driver, Shu-fen (Janel Tsai), and her two daughters, 20-year-old I-ann (Ma Shih-Yuan) and 5-year-old I-jing (Nina Ye). I-ann lived in Taipei up until just before I-jing was born, when the three moved to the countryside, so to I-jing the city is brand new, a wonderland of colors and lights and hard surfaces, and Tsou gives us her viewpoint through the fractured prism of a kaleidoscope. It’s a bustling mix of images that perfectly sets the pace of the subsequent story.

Shu-fen is returning to Taipei to open a noodle stall in a busy night market in the center of the city. She is trying to reboot her life after paying off the debt of her ex-husband, who used to own some sort of factory and then disappeared when it went under. Her parents and two married sisters live in relative middle class comfort in the city, while her brother lords over a successful company that has business on the mainland. She is the black sheep of the family owing not only to her poor choice of spouse, but the inexplicable presence of I-jing, who, after all, is 15 years younger than her sister. Most of the movie’s through-plot addresses Shu-fen’s worsening financial situation, but the camera stays mostly on I-jing, who, as the titular character, dismays her old-fashioned grandfather (Akio Chen), who still believes that the left hand is the instrument of the Devil and tries to make her favor her right. These complaints lead the girl to believe that she actually is possessed, at least partially, by an evil force, but rather than try to exorcise it she allows it free rein in carrying out actions, like shoplifting, for which she feels no responsibility. Meanwhile, I-ann exercises her rebellious streak by securing a job at a semi-legal betel nut shop where she has sex with the owner for the worst of reasons, and Shu-fen is courted by a fellow night market operator named Johnnie (Brando Huang) who deals in a wide range of cheap sundries.

Tsou’s and Baker’s script nimbly weaves all these disparate threads into a satisfyingly dense tapestry depicting how modern urban sensibilities, not to mention the appetites they engender, can’t help but come into conflict with the filial virtues the characters pretend to honor. Though the story is closer to real life than Anora, Left-Handed Girl is still a movie in love with the kind of magical artifice that only movies can provide, and the facility with which Tsou propels her irrepressible story forward gives the entire production a sense of joyful immersion that’s impossible to resist. The characters go through hell, but the film is a kind of heaven. 

In Mandarin and Min Nan. Opens Aug. 14 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Left-Handed Girl home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Left-Handed Girl Film Production Company Limited