This thought-provoking documentary follows a “mistress dispeller” – a professional specialist in ending infidelity – and intimately interrogates marriage, loneliness and labour in contemporary China.
Mistress Dispeller 2024
When a heartbroken wife suspects her husband of cheating, she decides not to confront him and instead hires a “mistress dispeller” – a specialist in ending extra-marital affairs. For a fee that can start at tens of thousands of dollars, this professional will adopt a false identity and involve themselves in the social circle of the client’s husband and his lover, eventually befriending the mistress and influencing her to end the affair of her own accord. As economic and cultural norms have shifted in China, this occupation is just one facet of a burgeoning new “love industry” where all manner of relational services can be outsourced.
This compassionate character study follows one such quadratic entanglement with remarkable access, capturing private conversations on love and loneliness rarely put to screen. By following wife, husband, mistress and mistress dispeller in equal measure, director Elizabeth Lo (Stray, NZIFF 2021) paints a strikingly intimate portrait of marriage, connection and communication in the 21st century. — Amanda Jane Robinson
“Gripping and fascinatingly conceived… Lo’s level of access is extraordinary…This level of intimacy and access is rare in any nonfiction film, guiding Mistress Dispeller toward a profound and searching panorama of loneliness and partnership, where everyone gets a chance to be heard.” — Ryan Lattanzio, Indiewire