Review: ‘Left-Handed Girl’
2025 / Dir. Shih-Ching Tsou
☆ 4.5/5
Watch if you like: The Florida Project, Anora, falling in love with the ShamWow guy, or going on a shoplifting spree but your evil devil hand made you do it.
Shih-Ching Tsou co-directed Take Out with Sean Baker and worked on many of his films as a producer, costume designer, and even actor. In Left-Handed Girl, her solo directorial debut, Baker returns the favor by helping to co-write and edit this film about a single mother and her two daughters moving back from the country to a cramped Taipei apartment to run a noodle stand in an urban night market. Fans of Baker’s work will find a lot of similarities, like empathy for financially insecure people, the tonal shifts into screwball comedy and dynamic iPhone photography—transplanted to a different local culture and mannerisms.
Tsou makes you fall in love with this family, crafting each character through a series of encounters that, although initially scattershot, culminate in an unforgettably disastrous birthday party that rivals the donut shop encounter in Tangerine. I left the theater delighted and entranced, eagerly waiting for the next chance I could watch Left-Handed Girl again.