Girlfriends begins where many coming-of-age films end: with the adult version of the protagonist already tired of herself. Lok, played at 34 by Fish Liew, is a Macau-born filmmaker in Hong Kong whose career has entered that humiliating limbo between promise and proof.
She has made one feature. The next one will not move. She teaches film history to students who treat black-and-white cinema like a minor workplace injury. Her girlfriend Bei Bei, played by Jennifer Yu, wants a flat, a child, a future with walls and paperwork.
This is where Tracy Choi’s film makes its most revealing choice. It does not move forward from crisis into resolution. It moves backward, as if adulthood were a crime scene and youth held the evidence. Call it reverse archaeology.
The structure takes us from Hong Kong to Taiwan to Macau, from professional paralysis to university recklessness to first desire. Three actors play Lok across these stages: Liew at 34, Elizabeth Tang at 22, Natalie Hsu at 17. They do not look identical, which initially feels like a continuity problem. Then it becomes the point. The film argues, quietly, that growing up is a form of estrangement. You become someone your younger self might fail to recognize across a room.
The Politics of Silence
The strongest scene arrives in Taiwan, during a dinner with Lok’s parents and her girlfriend Qing. Lok, with orange hair and the aggressive self-invention of early adulthood, has been pretending Qing is a flatmate. Then she grabs Qing’s hand across the table. That is the coming-out scene. No speech. No slammed door. No operatic parental collapse. Her parents understand. They choose not to understand.
That small refusal contains the film’s finest sociology. Choi understands a particular kind of familial denial, common across conservative households where love is never withdrawn, only administratively delayed. Lok’s parents are not monstrous. That almost makes it worse. Their silence turns acceptance into a room nobody is allowed to enter.
Girlfriends is filled with such half-spoken arrangements. In the Hong Kong section, Bei Bei’s plan to buy property in Macau is framed as romantic commitment, financial strategy, and existential trap at once. In Taiwan, Qing’s career decision pulls Lok toward a future she has not chosen. In Macau, teenage Lok’s attraction to an older schoolmate opens a door before she has language for the room behind it. The women around Lok keep making decisions. Lok keeps mistaking delay for freedom.
Three Cities, Three Versions of Fear
The regional movement matters. Macau is family, proximity, expectation. The teenage Lok lives in a cramped domestic world where academic success is treated as civic duty and the casino economy hovers like the only available weather. Taiwan gives her a more breathable identity.
The hair changes. The body changes. Desire becomes visible. Hong Kong then drains that visibility into rent, career anxiety, traffic lights, meetings with men who know nothing about art and everything about rejecting it politely.
This is where the film’s queer identity intersects with class and geography. The anxiety is never purely romantic. Housing presses on love. Family etiquette presses on truth. The film industry presses on artistic ambition until it becomes paperwork with better lighting.
I admire this. I also think the film occasionally lets its realism flatten into emotional fog. Lok’s uncertainty is persuasive, but the mood can become too uniform. The adult section in Hong Kong, with its stalled film project and domestic pressure, carries a heavy grey fatigue.
The Taiwan chapter has more heat, partly because Elizabeth Tang gives young Lok a reckless, slightly cruel voltage. The Macau chapter has softness through Natalie Hsu, whose version of Lok still believes discovery can arrive without a bill attached.
The problem is that Choi sometimes confuses quietness with depth. A meandering scene can feel honest for thirty seconds. After that, it becomes a calendar invite.
Bodies, Glances, and the Work of Staying
The performances hold the film together when the pacing loosens. Fish Liew makes adult Lok’s stillness active. She does very little in some scenes, but the body reads as a sealed container. Watch how she absorbs Bei Bei’s talk of property and children. She does not explode because explosion would require clarity.
Elizabeth Tang gets the flashier material, and she earns it. Her Lok at 22 is brash, sensual, defensive, and not nearly as liberated as her orange hair claims. The relationship with Qing has heat because both women seem to be bargaining with love as if it were a lease. Han Ning gives Qing enough practicality to make her choices sting. She is not the villain of Lok’s memory. She is another young woman trying to survive with a spreadsheet and a pulse.
Jennifer Yu’s Bei Bei also avoids the nagging-partner trap. Her desire for stability is not treated as bourgeois failure. She wants a life with Lok, not a cage for her. That distinction matters. The film is intelligent enough to see commitment as both refuge and threat, depending on who is being asked to sign.
Simmy Sin Mei Cheong’s cinematography separates the periods without turning them into postcards. Taiwan has brighter color and movement. Macau’s youth scenes carry a warmer haze. Hong Kong looks more functional, more boxed-in, less forgiving. The editing makes the backward structure legible, giving each past romance the feeling of an answer to a question adult Lok refuses to ask directly.
Girlfriends is at its best when it trusts gesture over declaration: a hand held across a dinner table, a body refusing to move toward a future, a younger woman looking at desire before she knows what it will cost. The film is imperfect, yes. Too brooding in places. Too slow in others. But its finest idea lingers: adulthood is not the opposite of adolescence. It is adolescence with better furniture and worse excuses.
Girlfriends is a semi-autobiographical Cantonese-language drama that made its global world premiere at the 30th Busan International Film Festival on September 20, 2025, before initiating a theatrical rollout across Hong Kong and Macao on March 5, 2026, and entering UK cinemas via limited event screenings in June 2026. The film utilizes a reverse-chronological triptych structure to map out the life of a 34-year-old Macao filmmaker who is feeling crushed by personal and professional stagnation in Hong Kong. As her current partner actively pushes her to transition into a conventional domestic marriage, she experiences deep psychological reflections on her past queer relationships at ages 22 and 17, evaluating whether to accept an ordinary life or continue fighting for an extraordinary path. Film enthusiasts looking to watch the feature can find it screening at international LGBTQ+ film festivals such as Queer East, on physical home media, or through select regional arthouse streaming platforms.
Full Credits
Title: Girlfriends
Distributor: One Cool Film Distribution, MetFilm Distribution
Release date: September 20, 2025
Rating: Category IIB
Running time: 101 minutes
Director: Tracy Choi
Writers: Tracy Choi, Lou Shiu-wa, Sebrina Zheng
Producers and Executive Producers: Charles Heung, Tiffany Chen
Cast: Fish Liew, Jennifer Yu, Elizabeth Tang, Han Ning, Natalie Hsu, Eliz Lum
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Simmy Cheong
Editors: J. Him Lee, Chen-Ching Lei
Composer: Ellison Lau
The Review
Girlfriends
Girlfriends is a tender, sometimes overcast queer drama that finds its sharpest truths in silence: a hand held at dinner, a future avoided, a younger self misread by the older one. Tracy Choi’s reverse structure gives Lok’s uncertainty real emotional sediment, even when the film’s brooding pace dulls its sharper edges. Imperfect, observant, quietly bruising.
PROS
- Smart reverse chronology
- Excellent Elizabeth Tang performance
- Honest family dinner scene
- Strong queer intimacy
- Distinct Macau, Taiwan, Hong Kong textures
CONS
- Slow, uneven pacing
- Mood can feel too grey
- Some scenes meander
- Adult Lok’s inertia repeats
