VENICE, Italy—Have you ever discovered the person you trust most in the world is being unfaithful? There are infinite ways of dealing with this discovery. The most obvious would be confronting the person directly, but that’s a tough thing to do—and it can end terribly. People seek revenge, get violent, and desperate. But what if there was someone who could do the work for you, a person you can pay to come in and end the affair before it ruins your life?
Elizabeth Lo’s fascinating documentary Mistress Dispeller, which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival, explores that very idea. In China, if someone has a suspicion their partner is cheating on them, they can hire a mistress dispeller. Their job is a tricky one: They integrate themselves within a couple and bring the affair to an end.
Mistress Dispeller follows an older woman who’s been married to her husband for decades. On the surface they have it all: a big apartment with a great view, a grown, successful son, and they’re financially secure. But their relationship has taken a turn in recent months, and when the woman discovers a text on her husband's phone, she discovers he’s been cheating. She then decides to hire the mistress dispeller, who calculates and calibrates every conversation to a chilling degree, expertly manipulating every scenario to get the information from the husband, wife, and mistress to bring their relationship back on track.
The dispeller has specific, rigid ideas on why affairs happen—mistresses, she believes, feel that they are undeserving of true love, so they latch onto people already in relationships that cannot give them the desire they feel unworthy of. This creates an interesting conflict when we get to know the actual mistress in the relationship, who seems very self-assured and confident in herself, and not the kind of desperate figure the dispeller describes.
This is a remarkably vulnerable film. The opening titles reveal that everyone consented to be in the film at the beginning and the end of the process, as the role of the mistress dispeller becomes clear to everyone involved.
It feels like a necessary notice; Mistress Dispeller is so shocking in how vulnerable its subjects are willing to be on screen that you can’t help but sit slack-jawed in awe at some of its most intimate scenes. It almost feels like an ethical boundary is being crossed—should we see real people at their most raw? But Lo’s camera respectfully keeps its distance, preferring static medium shots to intrusive close-ups.
Lo’s film almost unfolds like a narrative feature. There are no talking heads, nor any narration. It’s so bracing at times you almost expect a reveal in the credits that everyone involved is an actor, but that never comes. Context on the history of mistress dispellers is practically non-existent. We don’t know how many organizations offer these services or how long they’ve been around. There’s also no indication as to whether this phenomenon exists only in China or if it’s spread worldwide. It’s a frustrating decision, but it's a sensible one, as Lo hones in on a single family in crisis rather than the overall hierarchy of mistress dispellers.
The reason they exist is hinted at in the bracingly intimate conversations we’re privy to throughout Mistress Dispeller. The wife, who hired the dispeller, wonders to her cousin if she’s cowardly for hiring one instead of just confronting her husband directly. But why go through the difficulty of a heartbreaking conversation if someone else can do it for you? Lo’s film is an incisive exploration of how we communicate with one another, and how technology has made it easier than ever to hide things from others. As technology pushes us to look further into ourselves, will outsourcing more of our decision-making become inevitable?
What Lo has captured in Mistress Dispeller is astonishing. It almost feels like you’re listening in on real people’s private therapy sessions. When the husband reveals to the dispeller how he found himself in love with his mistress as well as his wife, it’s nothing short of riveting to see emotions laid out so plainly and honestly. One scene is so intense that the dispeller breaks the fourth wall, addressing the camera crew directly as she points out that filming an interaction like what we’re about to see is uncharted territory.
Mistress Dispeller is a riveting, exploration of a relationship on the brink. And through it all, one question lingers after Mistress Dispeller is over: Is the couple truly better off, or are the cycles that lead them to this breaking point bound to repeat themselves? That’s something Lo lets the audience decide for themselves.
