Mistress Dispeller Review: Love, Lies, and Emotional Labor

In the U.S., if you suspect your spouse is cheating, you hire a PI. In China? You might hire someone to end the affair altogether. That’s the real job of a mistress dispeller, and it’s the strange, totally human premise of Mistress Dispeller, Elizabeth Lo’s subversively thorny documentary about modern relationships, emotional outsourcing, and the gray spaces in between.

The film follows a middle-aged Chinese woman who hires professional “mistress dispeller” Wang Zhenxi to break up her husband’s affair. What unfolds is a complex, often contradictory portrait of love, marriage, and emotional labor in a culture where saving face often takes precedence over saving feelings. With calm precision and a long observational lens, Lo invites us into an unfolding triangle between wife, husband, and mistress — none of whom behave exactly as expected.

Wang — patient, deliberate, borderline inscrutable — works like a therapist in disguise. She listens. She infiltrates. She suggests, nudges, steers. There’s no shouting, no sting ops, no grand reveals. Instead, Lo captures intimate conversations and quiet confessions that make you forget you’re watching a documentary. At times, it almost feels like a low-key drama — the kind where a haircut can reveal more than a monologue.

And that’s a strength — until it isn’t. While Mistress Dispeller starts strong, its second half begins to lose shape. The rhythm slows. Scenes repeat. Emotional beats blur. For a film built on deception and emotional stakes, the tension never quite escalates. Instead of building momentum, it begins to meander, circling the same issues without bringing in enough new insight. A tighter runtime or sharper focus might have helped keep the emotional thread taut.

Lo, who previously directed Stray, brings a distinctly cinematic eye to the film, and her visual stillness is deliberate. Holding long, fixed shots — sometimes to the point of discomfort — creates space for her subjects to simply be. She resists sensationalism, even when the subject matter almost invites it. That restraint is admirable, but it also means some narrative threads go underexplored, especially the one I found most fascinating: the work of Wang herself.

The mistress dispeller as a profession is objectively intriguing— and under-explored here. We learn surprisingly little about how one becomes a Wang, what ethical lines are drawn (or crossed), or how often this type of emotional intervention even works. Instead, the film stays mostly locked into one marriage’s implosion. And while that story is engaging, I couldn’t help wishing we’d stepped outside it more often to understand the bigger picture.

Still, there’s cultural nuance here that makes it worth watching. In an American context, infidelity is often framed in absolutes — a betrayal, a dealbreaker. Mistress Dispeller shows a different kind of logic. A kind of emotional triage. The husband, emotionally distant and maddeningly passive, isn’t painted as a villain — just another man who drifted. The mistress isn’t a homewrecker. She’s lonely. Maybe even kind. The wife isn’t a martyr. She’s tired, but still hopeful. And somehow, they all coexist in the same tangled mess.

Documentaries should give us access to corners of life we rarely get to see. Mistress Dispeller does that. It invites us into emotional spaces that are usually hidden behind closed doors — and then asks us to sit with the discomfort. I just wish it had pushed a bit further past the surface. There’s a powerful story here, but it needed a little more focus, a little less repetition, and a few more questions asked.

Even so, Lo’s documentary opens a door into a world most of us didn’t even know existed — and asks us to consider what we might be willing to do for love, for dignity, or just for the illusion of stability.