Cya Liu

Wong To in Limbo (2021) spends most of two hours running through Soi Cheang's black-and-white Hong Kong of landfill and rain, and Liu runs like someone who has done it before. That is the first thing you notice. The second is smaller. She plays a woman who has decided she deserves whatever is coming, and Liu lets us see, in small movements of the mouth, the moment she starts to disagree with herself. Almost nobody in the film is on her side. Liu is.

She came into the business through a talent show in 2004 and into film two years later, with a lead in Thirteen Princess Trees (2006). So Young (2013), in which she played Zhu Xiaobei, was the part that got her noticed, and for a decade she worked across mainland films and television. From the late 2010s the Hong Kong roles came more often: Leung Wai-yin, a homeless single mother, in I'm Livin' It (2020), and then Wong To. Since then there has been Sakra (2023), a wuxia adaptation with Donnie Yen, in which she plays A Zi. We have reviewed only Limbo, so we will not pretend to a view of the rest.

The pattern in the casting is plain enough: women at the bottom, in hardship, getting by or not. She has said, "I am not a smart actor and have no acting skills", and claims to work from the people she has watched rather than from any method. Whether that is modesty or the truth, it fits what is on screen, because nothing in Wong To looks rehearsed. The physical side is real; Cheang puts her through fights and long stretches of endurance, and Liu never lets the effort read as acting. Opposite Gordon Lam's Cham Lau, who hits first and asks nothing afterwards, she is the one person the film seems to grant an inside, and she keeps it private from him and open to us.

We admired the performance and, by the second hour, we wanted the film to leave her alone. Both things are true and they are connected. Cheang is more interested in what can be done to Wong To than in what she might do, and the cost of being this good at suffering is that directors will keep asking for it. Our score for Limbo was 66, and the gap between that number and how we feel about Liu is roughly the size of that problem.

The sensible hope is that someone casts her in a part where nobody chases her and she has to make something out of a room and a conversation. Until then Limbo is where to start, and it will tell you inside ten minutes why people talk about her. Watch it knowing that the film asks a great deal of her and gives her rather little back.