‘Girls On Wire’ review: Implausible action drama from China’s Vivian Qu

Dir/scr: Vivian Qu. China. 2025. 114mins

Crippling debts, addiction and simmering grudges have dogged the families of cousins Tian Tian (Liu Haocun) and Fang Di (Wen Qi) since the girls’ early childhood. At least they had each other – until, that is, they became estranged. But after Tian Tian, now a single mum, kills a drug dealer in self-defence, she seeks out Fang Di, who is working as a stunt-woman in Xiangshan Film City. Together, and with the help of numerous unwieldy flashbacks, they must work out their differences and escape the grasp of the gangsters who pursue them. Vivian Qu’s follow-up to the sinewy thriller Angels Wear White is something of a let down – despite some intriguing insights into its milieu, this is a heavy-handed, implausibly-plotted chase movie that repeatedly tips into melodrama.

Can’t quite make up its mind whether it’s a crime thriller or a domestic drama

Qu reunites with Wen Qi, the child star of Angels Wear White. She’s one of the main assets in this uneven production, tackling the physicality of the role with conviction and acting as a bridge between the film’s uneasy collision of tones. In some ways, the film feels like a companion piece to Angels: Qu continues to explore themes of female oppression by the powerful and corrupt, in this case the money lenders of Chongqing who hold the women and their families to ransom. But this picture lacks much of the focus and the visual impact that made Angels such a success on the festival circuit and beyond. Girls on Wire will be released in China on March 8, International Women’s Day.

Qu flexes her genre muscles from the opening scene, which shows poor Tian Tian shackled in some kind of drug dungeon, in which she is forcibly injected with heroin by a leering dealer. To what end is not made clear – it’s certainly an extreme method of expanding a customer base, so we assume that it’s either revenge for the crimes of her father (Tian Tian’s dad, played by Zhou You, is a long-term junkie) or a prelude to a career in prostitution.

Stridently lit in blood reds and bile tones, Tian Tian makes a desperate bid for freedom, carving up her jailer in the process. She flees to Film City, armed with little more than a few social media posts from her cousin linking her to a convenience store that stocks snacks from her home region. In hot pursuit are two gangsters and, for reasons that are never explained, the hapless owner of a Chongqing hotpot restaurant.

Meanwhile, over in Film City, Fang Di is fielding final reminder messages from a lone shark called Madam Yang, and stoically taking the daily punishment required as a stunt-woman doing the wire-work for martial arts action productions. But having set up the story, the film then rolls back to the 1990s in Chongqing to show the cousins’ borderline dysfunctional childhoods. The kids clamber over bales of fabric, largely neglected, while Fang Di’s mum (Peng Jing) monologues about her aspirations for the family business and Tian Tian’s dad extorts his six-year-old daughter for cash to feed his habit.

It’s not that the 1990s backstory is irrelevant or uninteresting – on the contrary, this transitional period defined by the feverish, overly optimistic embrace of capitalism in mainland China is a fascinating one. The story of the doomed ambitions and an ill-fated knock-off garment factory could be the subject of a film in its own right. The main issue is that the tonal shifts between the ’90s segments and the early 2000s-set action are jarring and distracting; the reliance on repeated flashbacks disrupts the pacing and undermines the tension of a picture that can’t quite make up its mind whether it’s a crime thriller or a domestic drama.