YNOT at the Movies

It takes four people to send a single letter across an ocean: the writer, the scribe, the reader, the listener. Somewhere inside that fragile chain, director Lan Hongchun created one of the year's most unexpected box-office phenomena, "Dear You" (给阿嬷的情书 | China 2026 | in Teochew | 118 min.), a melodrama that never once feels manufactured, so heart-wrenchingly devastating and unapologetically sentimental throughout that hardly anyone leaves dry-eyed.

Xiaowei (Zheng Runqi), buried in debt, goes digging through his grandmother's attic during her 88th birthday party and finds the return address on a stack of qiaopi, the letters and remittances overseas Chinese laborers sent home, part of a correspondence system old enough to be inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. The letters were sent by his grandfather, Zheng Musheng (Wang Yantong), who left for Malaysia and Thailand when his grandmother, Ye Shurou (Wu Shaoqing), was still young and raising three kids alone. Shurou stops writing back in 1978, after a photo arrives showing Musheng with Xie Nanzhi (Li Sitong) and children she doesn't recognize. She assumes it's proof of a second family, built while she waited. Xiaowei heads to Bangkok hoping his rich, absent grandfather can bail him out. What he finds instead is a story about loyalty, sacrifice, generosity, and gratitude that has nothing to do with money.

That story is where the film resonates the most. It's the almost-forgotten practice at the center of it, one that shaped generations of immigrants and the families they left behind, that makes the story unique and profoundly moving. The nostalgic recreation of that vanished mid-century diaspora world is remarkable; every set piece feels like it was built to be lived in, not photographed.

Where the film falters is in what it leaves out and what it adds. The comedy bolted onto Xiaowei's present-day search is a bit forced, and it undercuts the gravity of what's unfolding in the flashbacks. More glaring is the omission: the script never makes the effort to reckon with how dangerous an overseas connection was during the Cultural Revolution, or how Shurou and her family actually survived carrying that risk. Zhang Yimou has spent a career sitting inside exactly that kind of danger; a film willing to go there might have hit even harder.

Wu Shaoqing plays Shurou's decades of believing her husband betrayed her, without ever letting them harden her into someone cold or vindictive. Li Sitong, playing Xie Nanzhi, makes what could have been a one-note "other woman" figure into someone with her own claim on sympathy. Wang Yantong is the film's emotional center as Zheng Musheng, a husband who spends a lifetime far from home carrying nothing but a big heart and the conviction that he can build his wife and kids a better life once he returns. It's a performance that makes the letters land the way they do, patient, generous, never once playing for pity.

In the end, this is a tribute to a generation whose devotion meant giving up everything for a family they might never see again, and it's hard to imagine walking out of it unmoved.

"Dear You" opens in theaters on Friday, September 4, 2026.