Better Days (2019) Review: Two Outcasts Against the World

Is Better Days worth watching?

Yes. Better Days is a devastating, beautifully acted drama about school bullying and first love, and one of the most emotionally powerful Chinese films of recent years. Derek Tsang combines the intensity of a thriller with the tenderness of a romance, and Zhou Dongyu and Jackson Yee give performances of startling rawness. The reservation is a final stretch that leans toward melodrama and a framing that sometimes feels shaped by what the film was permitted to say, but neither dims its force.

What is Better Days about?

Better Days follows Chen Nian (Zhou Dongyu), a quiet, studious high-school senior in the final months before China’s gruelling university entrance exam. Her mother is often away and in trouble with debts, and Chen Nian is focused on one thing: scoring well enough to leave.

When a tragedy at school turns a group of classmates’ cruelty toward her, led by the popular Wei Lai (Zhou Ye), she becomes the target of relentless bullying. A chance encounter with Xiao Bei (Jackson Yee), a teenage street fighter living on the margins, leads to an unlikely alliance: he agrees to shadow and protect her, and their bond deepens into something neither of them expected. Yin Fang plays a young police officer whose path crosses theirs.

Tsang directs a Chinese-language production in Mandarin, adapted from a popular novel, and it runs 135 minutes. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.

Bullying filmed without looking away

The film’s portrait of bullying is its most harrowing achievement. Tsang shows how cruelty spreads through a school: the whispering, the phones held up to film, the teachers who notice too late, and the pressure-cooker atmosphere of an exam system that treats students as scores. The bullying scenes are hard to watch precisely because they feel so ordinary to the people inflicting them.

Tsang uses a restless handheld camera and close framing to keep the audience trapped with Chen Nian, and the city around her, with its narrow streets, stairwells and underpasses, becomes a maze she can never quite escape. The film also becomes gripping as a drama of suspense, because the threat to her never feels far away.

Zhou Dongyu and Jackson Yee are extraordinary

Zhou Dongyu gives a remarkable performance, playing Chen Nian as guarded, stubborn and constantly calculating how to survive. Her face registers every humiliation, but she never plays the character as merely a victim, and her flashes of defiance are thrilling. The performance won her a string of major acting awards.

Jackson Yee matches her. Xiao Bei is rough, funny and fiercely loyal, and Yee finds a surprising gentleness beneath the swagger. Their relationship is built on small gestures rather than grand declarations: a shaved head, a shared meal, a silent walk home at a careful distance. It gives the film its heart and makes the story’s darker turns hurt all the more.

Where the melodrama takes over

In its final third, the film shifts into a more plot-driven register, and some of the subtlety of the earlier sections gives way to heightened melodrama and a heavier use of music. The police subplot is less developed than the central relationship, and Yin Fang’s officer serves the story more than he lives in it. The film’s framing, which emphasises official responses to bullying, also sits a little awkwardly beside the rawness of what comes before.

Who should watch Better Days?

It is essential for viewers who love emotionally intense youth dramas and doomed romances, and for anyone interested in contemporary Chinese cinema. At 135 minutes, it is a substantial but absorbing watch. The bullying and violence are graphic and distressing, and the film deals with suicide, so it is best suited to adults and older teens.

If it moves you:

• In the Mood for Love, for another Chinese-language love story built on restraint, glances and longing.
• Black Coal, Thin Ice, a Chinese crime drama in which investigation and a fraught relationship become entangled.

The verdict

Better Days is a raw, heartbreaking film that turns a story of school bullying into both a gripping drama and a tender portrait of two outcasts finding each other. Its final act tips into melodrama, but its two lead performances and its unflinching honesty make it unforgettable.

Rating: 4.5/5