Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Wu Ke-xi, Vivian Sung, Hsia Yu-chiao, Shih Ming-shuai
Intro:
The editing is fluid, Lim Giong’s score bubbles away sinisterly, and it masquerades capably as a genre film, while harbouring far more subversive intentions.
The opening of Nina Wu, Myanmar-born filmmaker Midi Z’s first feature shot in his adoptive home of Taiwan, is an eerie phantom ride on the Taipei subway. It’s an adept visual metaphor, a premonition of the psychological tunnels down which its titular protagonist will tumble. Working with long-time muse Wu Ke-xi, who shares a screenwriting credit, Nina Wu is Midi Z’s take on a ‘MeToo’-era psychological thriller, reaching back to Polanski’s paranoid ’60s thrillers to mirror the deterioration of the mind of a female protagonist in the physical set. On the style front, he emulates the baroque excess of Aronofsky and Nicolas Winding Refn, especially in the pointed use of the colour red. It’s fortunate he has such an unusual and intuitive visual sense, as Nina Wu otherwise feels like three distinct movies warped into one.
Struggling actress Nina lands her first big role in a salacious period production, despite transgressing moral and personal boundaries. The film about filmmaking angle is ultimately perfunctory, although the lavishness of the staging suggests a sly parody of The Bold, the Corrupt and the Beautiful, 2017’s preposterously over-the-top melodrama that gave Wu her breakout role.
In its dominant mode, Nina Wu is a powerful and bitter critique of the degradation perpetrated against vulnerable women in the ‘entertainment industry,’ and the long psychological shadow it casts over them. On a character level, the film is structured around this polemical point, doused in the excess of sex and power but never erotic. It’s a clever exercise in making the audience feel awful without crossing over into the exploitative: the film withholds, for example, any actual nudity. The bluntness of the delivery, however, detracts from the veil of mystery.
Finally, there is a heartfelt love story between the lead and Vivian Sung, as unpretentiously charming as she’s ever been on screen but wasted in this role, and swallowed up by the sharp edge of the film’s thrust. As for Wu, she is a fascinating screen presence, utterly capable of anchoring the film. She and Midi Z share an obvious rapport developed over their long period of collaboration, and this is reflected in his understanding of how to channel her almost austere features through brittleness and versatile countenance. The most unnerving images put Wu front and centre, isolated in the frame, wearing a perpetually fraught and disoriented expression, her face scrunched up.
A film on the intrusion of the past into the present, Nina Wu disrupts its chronology with unwelcome, nightmare-tinged flashbacks. The editing is fluid, Lim Giong’s score bubbles away sinisterly, and it masquerades capably as a genre film, while harbouring far more subversive intentions. The powerful central performance and aesthetic flair hold it together, more or less, even though it never coheres narratively.
