The Marriage Plot

A good plot results more than anything in the feverish need to keep watching. And even a good documentary plot need not be formally mind-blowing to keep us engaged. It’s really this last aspect—its engagement in form—that makes Mistress Dispeller so extraordinary.

Lo favors composed, locked-off frames that let social relations register spatially. For example, the first time we see husband and wife, they are seated at the same table but held apart by negative space—they’re as far apart as the lens will allow them to be. It feels less like a messy documentary capture, and more like a perfectly blocked drama—which is precisely why viewers start to wonder if it can possibly be real.

Each character in the love triangle is given the respect of time and space to be fully human, but most striking to me is how the mistress, arguably the most vulnerable figure in the arrangement, is treated with unusual care. In a premise that could easily reduce her to antagonist or obstacle—the plot is literally “dispel the mistress”—she is instead granted the same dignity as everyone else. I would argue this is the most radical part of the film.

Outside the triangle, but manipulating all involved in it, is Teacher Wang, the dispeller. She mediates the situation while allowing all involved to save face. She is part strategist, part therapist, part actor who reveals some specific aspects of Chinese culture—a tradition of favoring the use of mediators over direct confrontation—while also reminding us that, as Lo has said, these kind of romantic troubles are “the most relatable thing in the world.”

Of course, ultimately, the plot (there’s that word again) had to be revealed to all to secure final consent to use the footage. “We started filming in 2021, and we filmed with multiple cases and various clients over three years,” Lo said. “The couple that you see in the film is the couple that we got the richest and deepest access with and who chose to remain in the film by the end of the process.”

This layered, gradual negotiation for access and consent mirrors the emotional choreography Lo captures with her patient, careful camerawork. There are similar stages of revelation and renegotiation in both the on-camera and off-camera work she is doing.

Mistress Dispeller is even more remarkable when one considers it is only Lo’s second feature documentary. Her first feature, Stray (2020), follows one street dog in Istanbul, and its formal gamble was to decenter the human viewpoint and align her camera with the dog. Both films are masterclasses in perspective.

But they are equally masterclasses in the kind of faith and devotion that great art requires. For Mistress Dispeller, Lo filmed for years inside an ethically volatile situation without any guarantee that anyone would ultimately sign releases. That is faith. In both films, Lo goes to extraordinary lengths to represent, honor, and dignify the points of view of her subjects. That is devotion. Lo’s commitment to her own ethical and artistic process allowed her to create a documentary that feels at once ethical and observational and, improbably, exhilarating.