General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Nina Wu (灼人秘密)

Nina Wu (灼人秘密) is a 2019 Taiwanese psychological thriller directed by Midi Z (赵德胤) and written by the actress Wu Ke-Xi (吴可熙), who also plays the title character. The film follows Nina, an extra who has waited eight years for a break, as her long-awaited first lead role turns into a nightmare of trauma and unraveling perception. It was selected in the Un Certain Regard section of the 72nd Cannes Film Festival, the first Taiwanese film to enter that section in eleven years.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writers	Midi Z (赵德胤), co-written with lead actress Wu Ke-Xi (吴可熙)¹
Cast	Wu Ke-Xi, Vivian Sung (宋芸桦), Zaizai Lin / 夏于乔, Shih Ming-shuai (施名帅)¹
Format	2019, Mandarin, 103 minutes, color, DCP, rated 15+ in Taiwan¹^•³
Production	Taiwan, Malaysia, and Myanmar; year of production 2018; edited by Matthieu Laclau⁴
Festival	Un Certain Regard, 72nd Cannes Film Festival (2019); first Taiwanese film in that section in 11 years²
Golden Horse Awards	Won Best Sound Effects (2019); nominated for Best Director, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Design, Makeup & Costume Design, Original Film Score, and Original Film Song³
Taiwan release	July 19, 2019; Taipei Film Festival opening film; box office about NT$7.35 million⁵^•⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Story

Nina has worked as an extra for eight years without appearing in a film. She finally gets an audition for 谍恋 (a spy drama within the film), hesitates over its full-nudity scene, and lands the lead role. From there the film traces her descent: a director who grips her neck and slaps her during direction, a producer's demands, hallucinated lizards, cockroaches, and a recurring red-dressed woman, and a return to her family home where her father's business failure and debts compound the pressure. The Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute synopsis describes her gradually being pushed toward madness as the boundary between what happened and what she remembers dissolves.¹^•⁵

The Golden Horse festival synopsis frames the premise as a question of cost: to secure her stardom Nina goes fully nude on camera and confronts the director, while a family economic crisis and a reunion with the close friend she once abandoned push her toward the edge.³

Origins of the script

The screenplay came from Wu Ke-Xi. After being nominated for Best Actress at the Golden Horse Awards for Midi Z's The Road to Mandalay (再见瓦城, 2016), she turned down similar foreign-migrant roles, spent nearly a year unemployed, and then watched the Harvey Weinstein scandal ignite the #MeToo movement. Drawing on her own observations of the entertainment industry, workplace injustice faced by women, and testimony from the #MeToo movement and accounts of post-traumatic stress, she wrote the script and sent it to Zhao in 2018; he read it in one sitting and decided to shoot it as a genre picture.⁸^•⁹

For Zhao, born in Lashio, Myanmar, the film marked two departures. It was his fifth narrative feature and the first not to deal with Myanmar, after the "Homecoming" trilogy and The Road to Mandalay; and it was his first thriller, a deliberate move away from the plain realist style of his earlier work. Funding came from producers in Malaysia, Myanmar, Germany, and Taiwan.¹⁰^•³ Production itself was strained: Zhao said financing was still not in place two weeks before shooting began and that not a single day of the process went smoothly.⁵

To render the heroine's distorted perception, Zhao built the film around post-traumatic stress: the protagonist's consciousness is no longer objective, so dream, memory, and reality interleave. He interviewed people living with PTSD to capture sensations such as sudden, unfounded vertigo and hypersensitivity to sound.⁹ A critic for Funscreen Weekly read the film's sound design (boiling water, dogs barking, a scalded gecko, cockroaches) and its saturated colors and hard lighting as the sensory amplification of hypervigilance, a portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder in genre-thriller terms.¹¹

Cannes and international reception

The film premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in May 2019. Zhao said Cannes had written to say the selection committee at one point assumed the film was directed by a woman, which he took as a sign he had not failed his screenwriter.² Coverage was extensive: Zhao's team counted more than 100 Western reports, including interviews from AFP and the BBC, and he said directors Quentin Tarantino and Kathryn Bigelow responded warmly to the film, with Tarantino jokingly asking whether Zhao had "stolen a few moves" from him.⁶^•⁸

Zhao cut the film through 13 versions during editing, ranging from 130 to 180 minutes in length.⁹ For the 3rd Malaysia International Film Festival, where the film served as the opening screening, a further re-edited version differing by 20 percent from the Cannes cut was prepared to meet local requirements.¹² Distribution rights were sold to 28 countries and regions.⁸

Taiwan release, awards, and box office

The film opened the Taipei Film Festival on June 27, 2019, its first public screening after Cannes; its 600 seats sold out within six minutes of the box office opening. It went into general release in Taiwan on July 19, a date Zhao noted was exactly the twentieth anniversary of his own arrival from Myanmar.⁵^•⁶

At the 56th Golden Horse Awards the film received eight nominations and won Best Sound Effects.³^•¹³ Wu Ke-Xi did not win: the Taiwan Cinema Yearbook noted she missed the Golden Horse Best Actress shortlist and also fell short at the comparatively less competitive Taipei Film Awards, suggesting a gap between her anguished, startled performance and external expectations of it.¹⁴

Commercially the film earned about NT$7.35 million in Taiwan. The magazine Fountain judged this roughly a break-even result: despite a screenwriter-star, a Cannes Un Certain Regard selection, and #MeToo topicality, the buzz translated only modestly into ticket sales.⁷

Themes and critical reading

The film is routinely read alongside the #MeToo movement: the Golden Horse program describes it as looking directly at ugly trauma through an interweaving of the real and the unreal, echoing Hollywood's #MeToo moment.³ Reviewers have compared its portrait of a woman tormented by her own mind to Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue (1997) and Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan (2010).¹¹ The Funscreen critic argues the film's real subject is not the secret's content but how it burns: the trauma intrudes into Nina's perception in fragments, and the film withholds judgment on "why" in favor of depicting how pain revisits and reshapes her.¹¹ Zhao himself said his main fear was turning the film into a mere complaint, and that lifting certain dramatic elements into the surreal, away from strict realism, was essential to the design.³

The film also marked a milestone for its director's international standing: after Ice Poison (2014) in the Berlinale Panorama and The Road to Mandalay (2016) in Venice Days, its Un Certain Regard selection was the first time a Zhao film entered one of the three major festivals' official sections at Cannes, and it was the only Taiwanese film selected at Cannes in 2019.¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2015 to 2019 › Drama films 2019

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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