In Mistress Dispeller, director Elizabeth Lo ventures into a genre of her own creation. Her follow-up to the acclaimed Stray (2020) presents an unsettling and intimate docudrama set in mainland China, where the peculiar profession of “mistress dispelling” is now part of a booming market. The film peers behind the scenes of a marriage, an affair, and the intervention of a professional named Wang Zhenxi, offering a quietly compelling exploration of love, loyalty, and control.
Catch Mistress Dispeller in theaters beginning Friday, October 24th at the Laemmle Monica Film Center and NoHo 7.
Lo’s vision is unmistakably her own. Where Stray focused on abandoned dogs and human neglect in Istanbul, here she turns her lens to human relationships in crisis—not through sensational extremes, but with a restrained, observational calm. She and her cinematographer team let the camera linger on nuanced interpersonal dynamics: a wife’s anxious shopping trip, a husband’s distracted gaze, the mistress’s self-awareness as she negotiates a role she didn’t ask for. In the final analysis, Mistress Dispeller is not about spectacle, but the subtle clashing between confrontation and conformity.
The film introduces us to Mrs. Li, who quietly recruits Teacher Wang to dismantle the connection between her husband and the woman he’s been seeing on the side, Fei Fei. Lo captures this unorthodox dynamic with a humane detachment, refusing to vilify any participant. Even as cultural norms and power imbalances become visible, empathy remains the guiding light. What emerges is a portrait of a marriage not collapsing, but recalibrating, and of people not defeated, but learning to endure.
Though the subject matter could easily slip into tabloid territory, Lo’s filmmaking resists such banal classification. There are no confessions in stormy rooms, no sensational betrayals caught mid-explosion. Instead, there are conversations in soft tones, eyes averted, secrets kept because silence is part of the contract, and it is in such understatement that the film’s power ultimately resides. The subject feels somehow unadorned, authentic, but also strange and slightly off-kilter in a way that unsettles our own assumptions about fidelity and intervention.
Mistress Dispeller blossoms as a subtle investigation of what it means to stay married when the rules never quite fit you. Lo confronts the idea of agency under imposed systems—Chinese or otherwise—and asks: What is the cost of preserving appearances, resisting corrosion, and keeping a marriage intact? The film’s reward lies less in clear resolutions than in the ambiguous space between duty, love, and desire.
“Teacher Wang gradually morphs into… a Chinese Esther Perel, a relationship therapist tasked with getting severely private people to recognize their true feelings, amid a culture that hasn’t necessary [sic] trained them for ‘self-care’.” – Tomris Laffly, Variety
“[T]he innate goodness and human vulnerability of these people shines through.” – Leslie Felperin, The Guardian