Chicago International Film Festival 2024: 'Mistress Dispeller'

Intimacy. We all crave it and need some form of it, in our early years at the very least, in order to ensure our very survival. But if the movies are any judge, we don’t seem very good at it.

Yet Mistress Dispeller gives us such a startling insider’s view of it that it’s truly shocking it comes in the form of a documentary. Generally such stunning access to a family crisis comes in the form of a fictionalized story because it must. How would we gain such an understanding of the inner workings of family and marriage otherwise?

It’s so startling in fact that the familiarity of the story feels both almost beside the point and simultaneously comforting. A middle-aged woman discovers her husband is having an affair the way modern people often do - she sees his texts to a much younger woman. What she does after is what adds the specificity to the universal nature of what unfolds: she hires the titular mistress dispeller, referred to as Teacher Wang.

In China, Wang is part of an industry that has emerged hand in hand with the nation’s prosperity and thus its rising rates of infidelity in a place that also prizes the family. What follows claims to be unscripted, with no reenactments and the willing participation of all involved in its love triangle. And it is truly remarkable, not merely for Wang’s competence at her job, which is equal parts couples counselor and benevolent master manipulator.

Inserting herself into the life and relationship of the married couple and their family, Wang not only gets the husband to admit his infidelity to her, he eventually takes her to meet his mistress, who Wang also seamlessly ingratiates herself to. Judgment isn’t her goal, and she unearths understanding between all parties, who are each grappling with loneliness in their lives.

The marrieds at the center are considered role models, the couple that, as the wife puts it, still hold hands in the street, and share a closeness she never thought could be invaded or shaken. The husband in question loves his wife and never truly considers leaving her, but feels unable to give up the woman he sees as a means to feel alive and escape from daily life. And the woman in between them is vulnerable enough to state that she has such a desire to be cared for that she accepts being second in someone’s life, along with a self-sabotaging streak that attracts her to unavailable men.

None of it is especially surprising, but to view it from within feels revolutionary in the most humane way possible. The question which naturally occurs is how director Elizabeth Lo got this kind of trust from everyone involved, but she seems to share at least some philosophy with Teacher Wang in this case, who believes that who she is and what she does is of no importance, even though she is the prime mover of much of what we see. 

Perhaps we should all be so lucky to have such compassion when we find ourselves at a crisis, even if the therapy that might be required could seem extreme to some.

Grade: A-