In her two earlier movies, Chinese language filmmaker Vivian Qu‘s apparent curiosity in surveillance has pushed her narratives. In her debut function “Lure Avenue,” CCTV is each a assist and a hindrance; whereas sophomore function “Angels Put on White” hinges on the facility of a well-timed recording. For those who can put it on tape, Qu’s movies argue, perhaps you possibly can perceive slightly higher. You’ll be able to at the very least watch it once more, maybe with contemporary eyes, contemporary perspective.
Qu’s third movie, Berlin premiere “Ladies on Wire,” is much less obsessive about literal surveillance tape, however the filmmaker’s compulsions towards the facility of the display stay, even when they take a special form. Granted, we don’t get to the display for some time, as a substitute opening in a dank, dismal cave the place one in every of our two main women has been trapped in a drug-induced hell. Quickly, nevertheless, the quick-witted Tian Tian (Lia Haocun) has freed herself, alighting for the one place she thinks would possibly home the one individual left who loves her.
Fittingly for Qu’s pursuits, that place is Xiangshan Movie Metropolis (extra formally referred to as Xiangshan World Studios), an enormous movie studio (and vacationer attraction) that may home dozens of productions at a time. And, someplace on that lot, Tian Tian believes her estranged and beloved cousin Fang Di (Wen Qui, who beforehand starred in Qi’s “Angels Put on White” when she was simply 14, on the time, she was billed as Vicky Chen) is working as a low stage stuntperson. With nothing left to do and nowhere else to show, Tian Tian ventures to the lot, hoping she can’t solely discover Fang Di, however draft her into serving to Tian Tian escape the very harmful, very indignant mob bosses who had been holding her in that cave to start with.
Two wily cousins tackle the mob whereas additionally working round an enormous movie set? What could possibly be higher? And but, “Ladies on Wire,” which Qu additionally wrote, is commonly much less compelled by the ingenuity of its set-up than the circumstances that obtained Tian Tian and Fang Di there within the first place. Over the course of the movie’s practically two-hour working time, Qu flips between time and place, utilizing flashbacks to assist illustrate each the cousins’ intense bond and the methods through which the remainder of their seemingly doomed household helped break them aside 5 years in the past.
These unfolding flashbacks are likely to dilute a lot of the movie’s vitality, basically throwing up large “STOP” indicators the second issues actually get going, and pausing to toss us again into the pair’s more and more fucked up childhood in Chongqing. Whereas they do add emotion to the story — plus actual dimension to the connection between the cousins, who grew up extra like sisters — their frequency rankles and retains the movie from ever feeling grounded in what’s taking place now. And that now is, by far, essentially the most compelling a part of the movie.
The movie’s performances usually undergo the same destiny. Haocun and Qi’s performing varies, however when the celebrities are tasked with extra bodily work, they shine (nothing within the movie is healthier than its opening sequence, through which Haocun muscle mass her manner out of her jail, although a sequence involving Qi repeatedly enduring a moist, freezing chilly stunt comes shut). Extra emotional scenes, nevertheless, really feel hammy and didactic, heavy on the telling over the exhibiting (and that telling hinges on being rattling blunt about the entire thing, in addition).
But it surely’s no surprise the pair discover it so laborious to flee the pull of their household legacy, as their identities are solely tied up in it. Tian Tian has been doomed to comply with in her drug addict father’s footsteps (the hows and whys of that exact state of affairs are virtually unbelievably melodramatic), whereas Fang Di way back deserted her skilled desires (together with any money she’s earned) to assist repay the sizable money owed of her manufacturing unit proprietor mother and father (most of it seemingly resulting from her nouveau riche mom’s incapacity to carry out trustworthy accounting. If that every one sounds heavy, it’s.
Nonetheless, Qi finds sudden leisure within the trio of dangerous guys dispatched to seize the women (all caricatures of those sorts of dudes, all cleverly dealt with), together with a dim-witted driver, a silent powerful man, and the very put-out boss who can’t consider he has to do that. When the three find yourself in Movie Metropolis, their ineptitude leads them to the mistaken movie set, the place they find yourself tossed proper into the fray, care of a dizzy and fizzy sequence that sees them trying to do their jobs whereas additionally pretending to be movie extras. It’s the form of good, out of the field bit that performs to its distinctive location, and puffs the movie again up.
Twists like that add shock to a movie that, so steeped in tragedy and the load of familial trauma, usually appears to be driving to a single doable ending. However Qu’s capacity to maintain us targeted on the methods through which we get there stays a spotlight of the movie, if not the form of high-wire act Fang Di herself is used to trying, at the very least a special tackle what it means to carry out our ache, and to discover a place the place it could possibly drive off into some kind of proverbial sundown.
Grade: B-
“Ladies on Wire” premiered on the 2025 Berlin Worldwide Movie Competition. It’s at present searching for U.S. distribution.
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