Film Name: 即兴谋杀 / Her Turn / Casual Revenge
Last week I caught several films, including Caught Stealing, Mostly Sunny, After Typhoon, and others—all decent enough to watch but with mixed merits, leaving me unmotivated to write about them… But yesterday’s new release, Her Turn, was different. It successfully sparked my urge to rant.
Considering this is director Cheng Yanan’s debut film and the screenwriter’s resume isn’t particularly impressive, I shouldn’t be too harsh in principle. But the issues still need to be addressed—what can I say? “Her Turn” isn’t just a pure dud; it’s the kind of clumsy effort that tries hard but ends up falling flat.
Truthfully, it’s increasingly difficult for suspense films to deliver truly original twists these days. I wasn’t expecting mind-blowing revelations or unexpected reversals—just a well-paced narrative with clear clues and a coherent resolution would have sufficed. Unfortunately, “Her Turn” feels painfully unpolished.
First off, the film’s setup and “planting clues” feel forced. While many plot points become predictable under the “Chekhov’s gun” principle, they should still be woven in more subtly and naturally.
Right at the start, when driver Lin Wen takes He Siyi to the old mansion, he inexplicably points out a stretch of coastal highway prone to accidents—as if afraid the audience won’t grasp that trouble is brewing there. Similarly, He Siyi’s abrupt confession to Wu Liyun about her friend drowning feels utterly out of place. Given that He Siyi’s stated purpose for returning home is to claim her inheritance, and she displays intense hostility toward Wu Liyun from the outset—to the point where they can barely hold a conversation—this abrupt revelation of such personal information is jarring. Any moderately experienced viewer would likely immediately suspect the identity swap twist.
Furthermore, the film’s character relationships are shallowly developed, further diminishing the already lackluster suspense.
“Her Turn” features a manageable cast and relatively straightforward relationships, which demands higher standards for plot construction. Yet the film piles nearly all its crucial scenes onto He Siyi, Wu Liyun, and Lin Wen, resulting in an overloaded narrative that feels contradictory and bloated. Meanwhile, Dr. Luo, one of the key players, serves only as a flimsy red herring. The maid Ah Zhen and the family patriarch Mr. He, who should have carried more weight, are reduced to mere plot devices—barely more than symbols. As for the “frequent visitor” lawyer Pan, he remains entirely absent throughout, only appearing briefly at the end to deliver a notification. This feels like a clear case of the director running out of ideas and simply writing him out of the story.
Watching this kind of suspense film—where the framework looks promising but ultimately reveals itself as an empty, clumsy facade—is genuinely painful.
Ultimately, the film’s thematic choices are equally poor. With little substance to begin with, it spends most of its runtime posturing under the guise of suspense and horror, only to clumsily tack on a “pain of the original family” narrative at the end—a cheap trick that feels like adding unnecessary embellishments to a shoddy painting.
Honestly, setting aside the twist revealing Mr. He’s death at the end, “Her Turn” is purely a mystery film from start to finish—devoid of unnecessary emotional storytelling or auteuristic expression. You could even treat it as a murder mystery game movie. It consistently strives to build suspense and ambiguous ambiguity, even if its methods are derivative, its scares are jumpy, and Deng Jiajia’s “fashion show” is over-the-top. At least it’s heading in the right direction… Then it abruptly concludes with the accusatory line, “Not all parents in the world love their children.” Such forced contrivance not only fails to achieve any kind of catharsis but completely undermines all the effort put in before.
“Her Turn” is so weak and stiff that it makes even the much-maligned “Chen Sicheng-style” suspense films seem refreshingly clear-cut by comparison.
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