After years toiling in bit-parts, an actress finally gets her break with a leading role in a spy thriller. The part is challenging, not least because it calls for explicit sex scenes, and the director is often hard on her. But both the industry and the press think the results are sensationally good.

In an electrifying performance, the superb actor-writer Wu Ke-Xi works fiercely through her experiences of the film industry’s callous sexism. Saturated and hypnotically stylized, this magnetic tour de force punctures its glamorous facade through a vertigo-inducing collision of memory and trauma.