TIFF '24: "Mistress Dispeller" pours ice water over heated marital melodrama
Tuesday, September 24, 2024 at 6:00PM 
Elizabeth Lo's latest documentary has one hell of a premise. In modern-day China, a middle-class, middle-aged couple is going through a commonplace crisis we've seen portrayed in cinema a thousand times before. Mr. Li is having an affair with a younger woman, becoming increasingly distant from his spouse. Faced with heartbreak, Mrs. Li won't take the situation with the resigned acquiescence of a long-suffering wife. She categorically refuses to. And here's where Mistress Dispeller takes an odd turn, for the jilted spouse hires the titular professional, Wang Zhenxi, who specializes in the dissolution of such affairs.
Infiltrating the family as a distant relative, the mistress dispeller spends months investigating and reconstructing a broken bond. And somehow, Lo's camera is always there to watch it unfold…