The defining phrase for Taiwanese cinema in 2025 might well be “starting low, finishing strong:” while the first half of the year showed little momentum, the latter months delivered a decisive rebound. Of the five films that eventually surpassed NT$100 million at the box office, three followed a classic late-blooming trajectory, building their success gradually through word of mouth. Overall revenue climbed from NT$700 million in 2024 to NT$946 million, with market share rising to 11.75%. A glance at the year’s standout titles also reveals an expanding range of genres. Alongside the perennial draws of gangster dramas and supernatural thrillers were disaster spectacles, social-historical narratives, and female-centered arthouse films – clear signs that audience tastes are diversifying and that Taiwanese filmmakers are exploring a broader thematic terrain.
The first half of 2025 proved uneasy for the local industry. Taiwanese productions even withdrew from the competitive Lunar New Year release window, traditionally the most lucrative period in the theatrical calendar. Later releases, however, gradually reversed the slump. Director Hsu Fu-hsiang’s campus romantic comedy Lovesick paired newcomers Zhan Huai-yun and Chiang Chi, offering an appealing blend of laughter and tears that resonated with audiences. With NT$62.5 million in ticket sales, it became the highest-grossing Taiwanese film of the year’s first half. The supernatural thriller Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo, starring Jasper Liu, Angela Yuen, and Tsao Yu-ning, also performed solidly, securing NT$30 million and reaffirming the enduring appeal of local horror.
Summer brought formidable competition from international blockbusters. Hollywood’s F1: The Movie and the Japanese anime Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle swept through Taiwanese cinemas, the latter amassing NT$845 million and ranking third on the island’s all-time box-office chart. Amid such heavy hitters, the fifth entry in the long-running gangster franchise Gatao, titled Gatao: Big Brothers, leveraged a decade of brand recognition and the return of its core cast to secure NT$189 million.
Taiwanese films remained largely stalled until early September, when 96 Minutes finally broke the impasse. Directed by Hung Tzu-hsuan and starring Austin Lin and Vivian Sung, the NT$160-million production is Taiwan’s first disaster action film centered on the high-speed rail system. To enhance realism, the crew constructed the country’s first full-scale high-speed-rail train set in Taichung. Though the film opened modestly, it displayed remarkable staying power, ultimately reaching NT$207 million.
October brought another milestone with Mudborn, the feature debut of editor-turned-director Shieh Meng-ju, who also penned the screenplay. The film surpassed the NT$100-million threshold and emerged as the year’s defining domestic horror hit. This was followed by a wave of debut features from emerging directors. Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl and Shu Qi’s Girl, both the culmination of years of development, made notable appearances on the global festival circuit.
Based in the United States, Shih-Ching Tsou has long collaborated with Oscar-winning filmmaker Sean Baker. Left-Handed Girl marks her directorial debut and was shot in Taiwan, with Baker serving as editor and co-screenwriter. The film follows a single mother (Janel Tsai), who runs a noodle stall at a Taipei night market with her two daughters, portrayed by Ma Shih-yuan and Yeh Tzu-chi, trying to manage a fragile family life. Through brisk and finely controlled editing, the film brings to life the energy of Taiwan’s night markets and the intergenerational effort of these women to free themselves from precarious lives. It premiered in Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival and later made the 15-film shortlist when representing Taiwan in the race for the Academy Award for Best International Feature.
By contrast, Girl carries distinctly autobiographical echoes. Encouraged by veteran director Hou Hsiao-hsien, actress Shu Qi wrote and directed her first feature. Through the lens of cinematographer Yu Ching-pin, the film returns to Keelung in 1988, focusing on a teenage girl traumatized by domestic violence and struggling to navigate the fraught dynamics with her mother and her classmates. Lyrical imagery and a non-linear editing structure weave together multiple temporal layers, gradually reconstructing the protagonist’s emotional landscape. The film premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival before winning the Busan Award for Best Director at the Busan International Film Festival.
The Golden Horse Award for Best Feature Film went to A Foggy Tale, the sixth film written and directed by Chen Yu-hsun. Best known for his comedies, Chen here adopts a restrained realism to revisit Taiwan in the early 1950s. Rather than framing the White Terror era through overt political indictment, the film approaches history from the perspective of ordinary citizens. It follows a rural girl, played by Caitlin Fang, who travels to an unfamiliar Taipei to reclaim the body of her executed brother. Along the way, she bonds with a rickshaw driver, played by Will Or, as their shared journey – marked by loss and moments of compassion – gradually brings that turbulent era into clearer focus.
Produced on a budget of NT$120 million, A Foggy Tale underwent meticulous historical reconstruction. Language, costume, and urban landscapes were recreated through extensive research, combining purpose-built sets with modified existing buildings and digital effects to evoke the transformation of 1950s Taiwan from rural hinterland to emerging metropolis. While confronting a painful chapter of history, the film intersperses moments of everyday life – songs and dances, petty theft, street vendors – that soften the prevailing melancholy and offer a portrait of ordinary life.
Due to its somber historical subject, the film did not immediately generate strong box-office numbers. As word of mouth spread, however, it gradually surpassed NT$100 million more than two months after its release, carrying its momentum into the 2026 Lunar New Year season.
Another contender entering the holiday corridor was Sunshine Women’s Choir, adapted from the Korean film Harmony. The story centers on a group of female inmates who find solidarity and redemption by forming a prison choir. Director Gavin Lin and screenwriter Hermes Lu had previously scored a major hit with their Taiwanese remake of the Korean melodrama More Than Blue, which grossed NT$240 million domestically. Once again adapting a Korean film for Taiwanese audiences, the filmmakers align casting and song choices closely with the narrative, capturing the story’s emotional core: heart-wrenching family bonds and the tear-jerking power of voices rising beyond prison walls.
Interestingly, Sunshine Women’s Choir opened quietly in late December 2025, with modest first-weekend results. Yet within two weeks the film began an extraordinary turnaround. Twenty days after release it crossed the NT$100-million mark, and within six weeks it climbed to NT$534 million – becoming the highest-grossing Taiwanese film in domestic box-office history and sustaining its run well beyond the Lunar New Year holiday.
Two major domestic productions anchor the 2026 holiday slate: Kung Fu and Double Happiness, each courting audiences through sharply different genre strategies. Adapted by novelist-director Giddens Ko from his own book, the fantasy action spectacle Kung Fu carries a production budget approaching NT$280 million and features an ensemble cast including Leon Dai, Kai Ko, Berant Zhu, and Gingle Wang. The film follows two mischievous high-school boys who, after being bullied, decide to apprentice themselves to a mysterious drifter skilled in martial arts. Hoping to master kung fu to defend justice – and to vent the everyday humiliations they endure – they instead find themselves drawn into a strange and fantastical world. Beneath its seemingly freewheeling premise, however, the story gestures toward a pointed social allegory, exploring the various layers of harm and control inflicted on the vulnerable – from street thugs and predatory politicians to the machinery of the state. At the same time, it seeks to dissolve the familiar opposition between good and evil, arriving at something closer to a sudden moment of insight.
In both form and content, Kung Fu represents the most ambitious undertaking of Giddens Ko’s career. Building on technical experience gained from films such as Mon Mon Mon Monsters, Till We Meet Again, and Miss Shampoo, he indulges in stylistic experimentation, blending elements of Taiwanese television melodrama, traditional budaixi puppetry, and classic Hong Kong wuxia. The result is at once a nostalgic homage and a subversive comic riff, infusing the story with playfulness and creative flair. Brutal, high-impact action – choreographed by a Korean stunt team – is paired with 1,600 visual-effects shots that set a new technical standard for Taiwanese cinema.
Following the critical success of Little Big Women, director Joseph Hsu returns with Double Happiness, a film that probes deeper into familial tensions. His camera movement and blocking, along with the film’s narrative pacing, display a new level of maturity. The story follows a newly married couple (Liu Kuan-ting and Jennifer Yu) whose wedding plans spiral into chaos. With his divorced parents refusing to meet, the groom is forced to stage two separate banquets on the same day, an arrangement his Hong Kong bride gamely accepts.
The film unfolds amid comic confusion. Elaborate wedding rituals and a steady stream of relatives generate both humour and friction. From the arrangement of banquet dishes to the reception of guests – and the expectations of the elders – each detail generates new tensions. The narrative alternates between comic release and mounting pressure, propelling the story forward.
Yet beneath the festive surface lies a deeper rite of passage. Having grown up under the shadow of his parents’ estrangement, the groom has long found himself caught between them. As the big day unfolds, years of suppressed emotion finally erupt. Facing his parents with honesty becomes the final step toward the next phase of his life. Liu Kuan-ting delivers a finely calibrated performance that shifts between anxiety and quiet joy, while Jennifer Yu’s solid performance lends emotional balance. Supporting performances from Tou Tsung-hua and Yang Kuei-mei as the groom’s parents, and Tin Kai-man as the bride’s father, add further texture to the film.
Director Shen Ko-shang’s Deep Quiet Room is an international co-production involving partners from Taiwan, Italy, Poland, and New Zealand. Based on Shoher Lin’s short story of the same name, the film examines the lingering trauma of domestic violence through the lives of a married couple, played by Ariel Lin and Joseph Chang, and the woman’s father, portrayed by King Shih-chieh. Shen, who previously won the Grand Prize at the Taipei Film Awards for his documentary A Rolling Stone, makes his narrative feature debut while maintaining his longstanding interest in psychological landscapes.
The film opens with a brisk montage tracing the couple’s relationship from first meeting to marriage. Happiness seems within reach – until the wife undergoes a dramatic change after prenatal testing reveals the fetus is female, eventually leading to her suicide. Left grieving and bewildered, the husband must care for his aging father-in-law while searching for answers about his wife’s death. By retracing fragments of their shared past, he gradually uncovers some clues.
Shen’s twenty-year documentary background is evident in the film’s observational camera work and attention to performance. Subtle visual motifs evoke the buried scars carried by victims of domestic abuse. The performances of Ariel Lin, Joseph Chang, and King Shih-chieh create a delicate triangular balance, conveying the suffocating tension that can permeate intimate relationships.
The animated feature A Mighty Adventure, written and directed by Toe Yuen (the filmmaker behind My Life as McDull) follows three tiny forest creatures – a grasshopper, a butterfly, and a spider – who encounter one another by chance. Each possesses a distinct ability: one can leap, one can fly, and one can spin webs. Captured by a specimen hunter, they must cooperate to escape from a lab, only to discover they have been transported into a sprawling modern metropolis filled with new dangers. To survive, they must find a way to return to their original home – the lush, green forest they once inhabited.
Yuen began developing the project in 2007. Combining 3D animation with live-action photography, more than seventy percent of the film was shot in Taichung, with locations such as Maple Valley Park, Liuchuan Canal, and surrounding city streets serving as backdrops. The film presents the natural world, the urban jungle, and human society from a microscopic perspective – that of insects. Everyday objects such as stationery, desks, robotic vacuum cleaners, and fruit, as well as towering structures like buildings, sewers, water towers, and staircases, acquire entirely new meanings, creating a world rich in surprise and playful imagination.
With no spoken dialogue, sound design and music carry the narrative flow – an achievement recognized with the Golden Horse Award for Best Sound Effects. The production itself brought together creative talent from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia, a collaborative model that mirrors the three protagonists: each contributing its strengths while growing through cooperation.
Translated from Chinese into English by Francesco Nati.
Hsiang Yi-fei