Girls on Wire: feminist stuntwoman thriller has moments of brilliance

• Reviewed from the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival

A young woman flies through the air, leaping onto a rooftop with sword in hand, sleek black hair bouncing as she dodges spear-wielding guards and soars upwards. It’s a graceful sequence, an action heroine fantasy familiar from a hundred martial arts movies. Except here, no suspension of disbelief is necessary, no pretending that this is real; after all, we can see the wires.  

Moments after that stunt sequence, the woman is seen in her dressing room, wearily removing her wig and rubbing harness-bruised arms. This is Fang Di (Wen Qi), a stuntwoman and aspiring actor working at Film City, China’s biggest film studio. Far from glamorous, Fang Di’s daily life is exhausting; when she’s not being repeatedly plunged into cold water or dropped from great heights, she’s fighting to keep a straight face while reading awful dialogue in auditions for schlocky movies.  

But it soon becomes clear that Fang Di’s commitment to her work is about more than ambitions of stardom. Although estranged from her family, who live far away in another province, Fang Di is sending the bulk of her earnings back home to service debts owed by her factory-owning mother to loan sharks. When her cousin Tian Tian (Liu Haocun), whom Fang Di was raised alongside as a sister, arrives suddenly in Film City trailed by mafia goons, the two women are caught in a spiral of drugs, debts and violence, the roots of which can be traced back to their turbulent shared childhood.   

Girls on Wire is Vivian Qu’s third film as a writer/director, the follow-up to her break out second feature Angels Wear White, which screened in competition in Venice in 2017. Like its predecessor, Qu’s latest centres on an appealingly hard-edged performance from young Taiwanese actor Wen Qi, and offers a feminist take on crime tropes, using the genre to explore the experiences of women struggling to survive in ruthless contemporary China. But while individual sequences are sometimes brilliant, Girls on Wire is often unbalanced by the weight of its ambitions. 

Qu’s interests are many – in female friendship and sisterhood, in the meta-imagery of filmmaking, in China’s history of capitalist expansion and the consequences of the one-child policy – but trying to shepherd all these preoccupations into one film, while also delivering a gripping chase plot is almost as impossible as one of Fang Di’s high wire stunts. Crime thriller, family saga, action and social-realist strands tangle together, and the complicated plot quickly becomes difficult to follow. Sometimes as a viewer, I found myself feeling a little like the hapless gangsters, who in their pursuit of Fang Di become lost on a series of sets, drifting between genres – war movie, medical drama, soap opera – unable to locate the film they should be starring in. 

Still, the Film City setting means that Qu can play with the abundant archetypes and visual metaphors of contemporary cinema, and as a result these studio-set sequences are the movie’s strongest. Although uneven, Girls on Wire is at its most convincing when Qu exposes the artifice and illusions which lie behind idealised images of female strength and heroism – it’s when Qu dares to show the wires that her film takes flight.