‘Mistress Dispeller’ Review: Provocative Doc Follows a Woman Investigating Her Husband’s Infidelity | TIFF

In 2000, less than one-tenth of Chinese men and women (mostly men) cheated on their spouse. Some experts have blamed the ballooning economy for the tripling in marital affairs by 2015, which took China’s figure higher than even the United States. (Neither get close to Thailand, where more than half of people admitted cheating in a survey this year.)

What Thailand doesn’t have, however, are bespoke agencies where (mostly) wives can go and break up their husbands’ infidelity at prices starting in the tens of thousands of dollars. Elizabeth Lo’s striking documentary follows one such case. Mr and Mrs Li live comfortably in a tower block in Luoyang, an inland city in central China, where they raised a grown-up daughter who has moved out. In the past few months, Mr Li has begun seeing a younger woman, Fei Fei, who lives in a different city. He isn’t very subtle about it. Mrs Li catches on when she sees texts to her husband flash up on his phone. A tough woman with a fierce dignity, Mrs Li enlists Wang Zhenxi (“Teacher Wang”) and her business partner to investigate and end the tryst.

The most interesting part of Lo’s film is the shift in perspectives: Mrs Li’s recruitment of Wang is the inciting action, but it’s Wang’s undercover investigation of Mr Li that teaches us most about him. And then getting to know Fei Fei tells us more about the married couple than they could have taught us. As the renowned psychotherapist Esther Perel has argued, there are no heroes or villains in affairs. There are no heroes or villains in Mistress Dispeller either.

Lo, an NYU and Stanford graduate whose film was supported by the Sundance Institute Producers Program, has said she sought to teach Westerners about the nuances in Chinese society and, above all else, to remind viewers of our common humanity even as she depicts a society so different to any other. That she succeeds in doing brilliantly: it’s easy to go into Mistress Dispeller thinking that China is an extremely foreign place with an impossible-to-understand social fabric. But Lo’s film ends up making the opposite case: her subjects are profoundly relatable, their actions as flawed and erratic as those in any country. One Communist Party official tells a meeting attended by Mrs Li that “only when you are seen to manage your own family well will you be qualified to govern the world”. But the oppressive tendencies of the nation’s politics do not rub off on the people we meet here. They are as open and emotionally honest as one could hope the subjects of any documentary to be.

Perhaps predictably there’s an angst to proceedings in Mistress Dispeller, too. We begin and end in a hairdresser’s chair, Mrs Li and Fei Fei molding their identities (or seeking self-acceptance) in lieu of the same person’s desires. And in a series of lengthy but pleasant drone shots of Luoyang, Lo shows us the calm, if grey, hubbub of a society that Wang must get to the bottom of. Every Scottish child will know the Walter Scott couplet “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” Wang must traverse that web while also being careful not to get lost in its ethical maze. She stays professional, telling Mrs Li as she is hired that she will be “injected organically into the family.” Mrs Li tells her wearily: “I can imagine an affair happening in any family except my own.”

It’s Wang’s challenge in navigating this particular affair that make Mistress Dispeller compelling in the latter stages, and give it the air of a Poirot novel in which he inevitably learns about “the way we treat each other” in the process of solving a case. She notes stoically to a colleague after meeting Fei Fei: “In every case the mistress is the most unpredictable part. Once their emotions are triggered we can’t control them.” She knows that Fei Fei’s suffering and eventual disengagement from Mr Li is what will fundamentally end the affair – she has done this enough times – but watching her exact that outcome is painful to watch. Mrs Li begins the film as the victim in all this but by the end it seems to be Fei Fei, whose pain is the prerequisite for Wang’s mission to be a success. 

If there’s anything missing in Mistress Dispeller it’s some kind of formal accountability for Mr Li. Lo’s argument seems to be that that doesn’t happen. There’s no trial or prison sentence at the end of this investigation. Its final scene is a wonderfully made glimpse at what may come next for the couple, but you’d be forgiven for wanting an indignant feminist conclusion after everything. No luck. The wheels keep turning. Wang’s missions must continue.

Grade: B

This review is from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.