A Foggy Tale (2025)

"You must be brave. Bravery is all we have."

A Foggy Tale took place in 1953 Taiwan during the period of the White Terror. The story focused on a young girl traveling from her rural community to Taipei to retrieve her beloved brother’s body after he was executed for his ideas. The trek was harrowing as she faced numerous challenges in her desire to bring her brother home.

Huang Chih Yue has been secretly bringing food and water to her brother Yun who has been hiding in the sugar cane fields. He gives her his watch, telling her that with it she can travel forward in time and imagine better days when the going gets too rough. The young artist is chased down, arrested, and later executed. Yue is determined to bring his body home instead of letting the government dump it in a mass grave. When she arrives alone in Taipei she is overwhelmed by the sheer size of it. She’s quickly set upon by traffickers, but luckily enough rescued by a rough and ready pedicab driver. The two make an awkward pair and whether Chao Kung Tao is there as a helper or to help fleece her remains to be seen.

Caitlin Fang and Will Or gave strong performances as the odd couple scrambling to keep putting one foot in front of the other on a broken beam. This film was primarily Yue’s and Caitlin’s, following the young girl’s trials in the complete unknown of Taipei. Aside from navigating the large city under martial law populated with human traffickers and thieves, Yue’s primary obstacle was money. The fees for retrieving the body of an executed prisoner were astronomical for a poor girl from Chiayi. Yue also had no plans for how she would pay to transport Yun home. All she had was her bravery and perseverance. Chao’s interventions were at times beneficial and at others disastrous. He had an interesting skill set. Chao had been a soldier and learned to curse in several languages and dialects during his time in the military. A skill he frequently displayed. He also had a traumatic past having run afoul of the KMT merely by army associations. Terrifying agent Fan Chun dropped by on occasion to menace Chao and to try and gather information from his former prisoner on wanted men.

MDL currently has 9m88 listed as a lead, but she was in the film less than 30 minutes if you are a fan and wanted to watch this for her. She played Yue’s older and absent sister, Chiu Hsiu Hsia. Due to the family’s poverty, Hsiu Hsia had been adopted out as a child to a family in Taipei. 9m88 was given a three-minute song and dance routine on her introduction which seemed to be overkill for the supporting character, especially since she wasn’t seen again until near the end of the film. I don’t know the name of the actor who played the Robin Hood styled thief, Kao Chin Chung, Kao’s brief appearances were welcome levity in the film.

The film glanced over much of the terror that went on with the KMT despite the number of people who had been killed in the film by the secret police. Money was extorted and/or confiscated, especially by the police. Poverty was omnipresent in the rural and urban areas. Sometimes a finger was all a person could afford to pay for in regards to their deceased loved one. Chao was so broke he could only buy one cigarette at a time. Scarce jobs were lost at the whisper of an agent looking for a person. Yet food was still shared and grace offered.

If I have one complaint it’s that the flow of the story could be stilted at times with characters on the periphery distracting from Yue and Chao’s narrative trajectory and making the film unnecessarily longer.

A Foggy Tale contained moments that were tense, heartwarming, heartbreaking, and gently humorous. The unlikely alliance of Yue and Chao strengthened Yue’s resolve and brought out the bravery in Chao he believed he’d lost. Sparks of human kindness gave glimpses of light in the grim darkness all around. Friends and random strangers rendered unexpected support in a sea of people doing whatever it took to survive and get ahead. And nestled in Yue’s quest were her brother’s words of hope that in the future there would be peace. That there would be a day where people would not be killed for their ideas. Unlike Yun’s watch, time could not be sped up, Yue had to face what lie before her one minute at a time with most of that time used well.
(8.25 rounded up to an 8.5)

29 May 2026
Awards note: A Foggy Tale won the Golden Horse Award for Best Narrative Feature (2025)

Housekeeping note: This was my 100th review for 2026

Cutie Pie note: If you are a Tseng Jing Hua fan, despite being on the poster, he is primarily shown in a few flashbacks

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the fog that never lifts

there's a difference between disappearing and dissolving. when someone dies of old age, illness, accident they disappear. they vanish from the world all at once and leave a hole in the exact shape of the person they were. but when someone is executed for having the wrong thoughts, for dreaming of a different world, for daring to imagine that person doesn't disappear. they dissolve. they become fog. they become the air other people breathe without knowing where it came from.


the film follows one impossible week in the life of a girl who traveled to taipei to retrieve her brother's body. but what chen yu-hsun understands and this is what separates a good film from a film that stays with you is that the body was never the point. the body is just the reason yue leaves home. what she finds along the way is something else entirely: a world that punishes memory, that charges you for the right to grieve, that turns mourning into bureaucracy and pain into a fee. taipei isn't a city in this film. it's a system. and the system has no interest in letting you hold onto who you lost.

but people find a way. they always do. chao kung-tao is proof of that a broken man who still extends his hand, not out of pure kindness but for the most human reason possible: he's been in the hole before and he knows what it feels like. the connection between the two of them isn't pretty or clean. it's necessary. and necessity, in this film, is worth more than anything.

fifty years later yue is still looking. not for her brother she knows where he is. she's looking for the week she survived, the man who helped her survive it, the version of herself that held the watch with both hands and kept walking even without knowing where she was going. trauma doesn't go away. it just learns to live inside you quietly.

the fog never lifts. but with time you learn to see through it.

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