‘Left-Handed Girl’ Movie Review: Netflix’s Bold Indie Drama That’s Worth Your Time

From Le Pacte and Executive Producer Sean Baker (Anora), Left-Handed Girl is the solo directorial debut from veteran producer Shih-Ching Tsou (Tangerine, The Florida Project). Acquired by Netflix following its debut at Cannes’ Critics Week, the film is yet another Awards season contender for the streamer after it was officially selected by Taiwan as their Best International Feature nominee for the Academy Awards. 

Co-written by Tsou & Baker, their first script collaboration since 2004’s Take Out, the story follows a single mother, Shu-Fe, and her two daughters, I-Jing & I-Ann, as they attempt to restart their lives as they relocate to Taipei and open a noodle stall at the buzzing night market. Returning to the city after several years in the countryside, the family strives to adapt to the challenges of their new environment and stay unified. But when their traditional grandfather forbids the youngest of Shu-Fen’s children to use her dominant left hand, or as he deems it “the devil’s hand”, generations of family secrets start to unravel.

The film stars Janel Tsai (The Fierce Wife) as Shu-Fen, Shih-Yuan Ma as the eldest daughter I-Ann, & Nina Ye as the younger daughter I-Jing.

Shot entirely on iPhone, Left-Handed gives an intimate & immersive perspective of a vibrant city, a slowly evolving culture, and a family struggling to balance between them.

The film is often shot from the perspective of the youngest daughter, I-Jing, seeing the city anew, unlike her older sister and mother,r who have a history & family complications that color their view. I-Jing sees this new place as magical, a bubbly & brightly lit playground of experiences and people she’s never encountered. She’s also meeting her mother’s family for the first time, absorbing their outdated cultural touchstones and their shared disappointment in how Shu-Fen turned out despite their own hypocrisies & moral ambiguity. I-Jing internalizes these feelings and world views to paint her immediate family with a sense of economic desperation and poor character that she never had before. It’s no coincidence that her “devil hand” steals what she wants but can’t afford.

Shu-Fen has felt this way for a long time. When the camera turns to her, it’s always as a worn-down woman fighting against the current. Dragged down by the emotional, physical, & financial burdens of an abusive ex-husband, they had to escape. She’s constantly taking on water and putting her own needs & desires in jeopardy. Stigmatized & scandalized as an unwed mother in a patriarchal society, Shu-Fen can’t even gain support among the women in her own family; they reject her as a wife who failed to make things work, and it’s not their problem after marrying her off.

Stuck in between is I-Ann, a young woman who was forced to drop out of school in Taipei when they fled to the countryside. A once thriving student who was popular among her peers is now seeing the city for its grittier underbelly; she is constantly harassed by men, working a low-class job with a sketchy boss whom she becomes involved with sexually. Angry at the world, angry at her mother for covering her father’s shortcomings, and angry at herself for not taking up her own responsibilities, I-Ann is the vocal resistance to what her mother has become, putting the men in her life on notice for their reprehensible behavior and trying to cleanse their lives so they can move forward.

These 3 uniquely intertwined perspectives come crashing together in the film’s explosive, bombshell-laden finale that finally sets the trio free from the shackles of cultural & familial expectations, personal secrets, and the toxicity of the men in their orbit.

For writer/director Shih-Ching Tsou, Left-Handed Girl is a love letter to her former home, but also a shot across the bow to the culture that raised her. Researched, cultivated, & crafted with care, Tsou takes her experience in working with Sean Baker, telling stories about small communities and integrating their everyday lives into the fabric of their screenplays, and weaving it into the reflections of her youth to make something wholly her own; creating characters that are not only a reflection of her own battles but those that persist today after decades away. All of the wrong-footed stigmas against unwed women, all of the harm caused by outdated thinking, all of the patriarchal traditions that leave women who operate without them behind – this story rejects them all in a beautifully intimate portrait of survival.

Watch Left-Handed Girl If You Liked

• The Florida Project
• Tangerine
• Take-Out

MVP of Left-Hand Girl

Writer/Director Shih-Ching Tsou

In my conversation with Tsou, I was left with the impression that she is not your ordinary modern director, nor is this your ordinary modern film. Learning side-by-side with Sean Baker for decades, they created a system to make authentic stories from the ground up; working on real locations, casting people off the streets of the communities they’re serving, & blending the well-observed details of these communities into the framework of their screenplays. To enhance this system further, Left-Handed Girl was developed over a decade, with Tsou visiting Taiwan year after year to get everything she needed to make this movie the truest reflection of its modern culture clash and not relying on memory or bias to tell her story.

In this way, Tsou is a true artist working at an almost documentary level of cultural accuracy and detail. Left-Handed Girl feels lived-in and shot intimately because this seems to be the only way she and Baker believe to do it right; right to the artist, their subjects, and their worlds.

One of the best Netflix movies of the year, Left-Handed Girl brings the level of authenticity of several past Sean Baker films with the exceptional detail & care from writer/director Shih-Ching Tsou. Outstanding young actor performances from relative newcomers Nina Ye & Shih-Yuan Ma made all the more impressive as the family dynamic shifts throughout the film.