General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Dear Ex (我们都爱他！)

Dear Ex (谁先爱上他的, literally Who Fell in Love with Him First?) is a 2018 Taiwanese Mandarin-language comedy-drama directed by Mag Hsu (徐誉庭) and Hsu Chih-yen (许智彦), about a widow, her teenage son, and the dead man's male lover fighting over his insurance payout.¹^•² It was released in Taiwanese theaters on November 2, 2018, premiered globally on Netflix on February 1, 2019, and became one of the most awarded Taiwanese films of its year.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	谁先爱上他的, meaning "Who fell in love with him first"⁴
Directors / writers	Directed by Mag Hsu and Hsu Chih-yen; written by Mag Hsu and Shih-Yuan Lu (吕莳媛); produced by DEAR Studio¹^•²
Cast	Roy Chiu (邱泽) as Jay, Ying-Xuan Hsieh (谢盈萱) as Liu Sanlian, Spark Chen (陈如山) as Song Zhengyuan, Joseph Huang (黄圣球) as Song Chengxi²
Release	Taiwanese theatrical release November 2, 2018; Netflix global premiere February 1, 2019 in at least 190 countries²^•³
Format	Taiwan, 2018, 100 minutes, Mandarin, color¹
Golden Horse Awards 2018	Won Best Actress, Original Film Song, and Film Editing; nominated for Best Narrative Feature, New Director, Best Actor, New Actor, and Original Screenplay¹
Box office	About 65 million New Taiwan dollars, over three times the initial forecast⁵

Spoilers

Plot

The story follows three people linked by love and family. The adolescent Song Chengxi (Joseph Huang) loses his father, Song Zhengyuan (Spark Chen), to cancer. Instead of mourning, he is caught in a feud between his widowed mother Liu Sanlian (Ying-Xuan Hsieh) and his father's gay lover Jay (Roy Chiu), who has been named beneficiary of Song's insurance money.² Netflix describes Chengxi as an adolescent; the KQED review places him at 13 years old, while Netflix's own synopsis and Common Sense Media describe a 14-year-old.²^•⁶

As Liu fights Jay for the money, Chengxi gradually learns that what holds both adults back is not the money but the weight of the loving memories each carries of his father.² To escape his mother's needling, Chengxi moves himself into Jay's ramshackle apartment, and the two develop a wary bond.⁶ The film alternates among the three characters' perspectives, mixing flashbacks with present-day scenes; Sanlian begins the film adamant that she was "first" in her husband's heart, but learning more about Jay, whose ringtone is her husband's voice saying "husband, pick up the phone," forces her to question that belief.⁴ The Chinese title points to this question of who loved him first: the wife recognized by law, or the male partner who had known him longer.⁵

Production

Mag Hsu, an established television screenwriter whose credits include In Time with You, made her feature directorial debut here, co-directing with Hsu Chih-yen, a music-video director also new to features.⁵^•¹ The original script was written by the Golden Bell Award-winning Shih-Yuan Lu and later re-edited by Hsu; Lu has said the mother-son relationship drew on her own experience with her child.²^•³ The first cut tested poorly, and the editor Lei Chen-Ching worked with Hsu to restructure it, shifting the narrative focus onto the son, from whose perspective the story unfolds.⁵

The directors staged the film in bright, saturated colors to evoke a sticky Taipei July, a deliberate contrast with art-cinema images of Taiwan.⁶^•⁵

Reception and awards

After debuting at the Taipei Film Festival, the film swept Asian festival awards: at the 2018 Taipei Film Awards it won Best Narrative Feature, Best Actor, Best Actress, and the Media Recommendation Award, and it took the Asian New Director Award at the 2018 Hong Kong Asian Film Festival.²^•⁷ At the 2018 Golden Horse Awards, Hsieh Ying-xuan, best known as a stage actress, won Best Leading Actress, with further wins for Original Film Song and Film Editing from eight nominations including Best Narrative Feature.¹^•⁸ Taiwan then chose Dear Ex as its official Oscar submission for 2019.⁸

Commercially, the film topped Taiwan's box office on its initial theatrical release and ultimately took around 65 million New Taiwan dollars, over three times its initial forecast.⁴^•⁵ In 2019 it sold its international rights to Netflix, reaching at least 190 countries from February 1.³

Cultural context

The release date placed the film in the window between the Taiwanese court ruling that couples had the constitutional right to marry (May 2017) and actual legalization (May 2019), and weeks before the November 2018 referendums, in which 63 percent of voters opposed same-sex marriage and 30 percent supported it.⁵^•³ Critics connected the film's popularity to this debate, though director Mag Hsu said promotion did not present it as an LGBT film, and she noted that many gay viewers did not go to cinemas to see it.⁵

The film treats the gay relationship not as the issue to be debated but as a settled premise whose social consequences, inheritance and recognition, drive the plot, and scholars read it as a portrait of a mixed-orientation marriage shaped by social pressure.⁹^•¹⁰ Reviewers have generally classified it as a family drama rather than a romance, since its central arc is familial reconciliation.⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2017 to 2018 › Titles A to J

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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