IOU (Qing bu Zou de Men Shen, 請不走的門神)
Director – Steven Zhang Zhonghua – 2026 – China – 103m
*****
Two kids whose father has left are harassed by one of his creditors, who starts to take an interest in their welfare – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 30th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
This is set in a small village in China: for village, for which read something about the size of an English market town, not dissimilar to the milieu of Black Dog (Guan Hu, 2023). It’s essentially a three-hander: a young teenage girl and her little brother have been abandoned by their father (presumably a single parent, since we never hear anything about the mother) and have to fend for themselves.
Yinxiu (Amy Zhao), the girl, whose name translates as Silver Flower, and Jinlong (Liang Zhongyao), the boy, whose name translates as Golden Dragon, have the family property, which is a good start, but are otherwise living from hand to mouth in abject poverty. As the former explains in voiceover at the start, their father left to evade a series of bad debts incurred by setting up a home for racing pigeons, a popular sport in the village, which seemed like a good way to make some money at the time.
Whether or not he’ll ever come back is a moot point; it’s probably safe to assume he’s gone for good. Certainly, nothing is seen of him within the film.
Yinxiu is a pretty feisty type who can look after herself and her brother in an argument. She cares for the pigeons in their cages and is a competent bookkeeper who still runs her dad’s business without him there. At one point, she helps out punter Wei (Lam Wei) whose champion pigeon Flying Bullets went missing in the Berlin competition and who is offering a big cash reward to anyone who finds the bird, “a sure-fire winner”. It’s in the their pigeon farm, so the kids collect the reward.
Until the school tumbles to it, she is making ends meet at least to a certain extent by helping other kids to complete their homework as a side hustle.
When the kids go out and visit their aunt (Xia Lixin) at her food stall in the local market, we can see the family genes behind Yinxiu’s street smarts. If the aunt is savvy and not to be messed with, their uncle (Han Tongshen) is less so. The aunt says he’s no good, and constantly brandishes her divorce papers in public to proclaim they are now separated. He doesn’t stick up for himself and seems resigned to his fate; in this manner, the less pushy Jinlong takes after him.
The two kids are harassed day and night by a local debt collector Wu Zhengliang (huge Chinese star Aaron Kwok from Twilight of the Warriors: Walled in, Soi Cheang, 2024; Where the Wind Blows, 2022; The Storm Riders, Andrew Lau, 1998) , who paints unsightly slogans on their outside walls to shame them and blasts out looped recorded messages (subtitled translation, possibly by someone whose English is not that good: debt’s gotta be paid – that’s the fucking law) from his huge white van about paying up what their father owes him.
The girl warns him not to mess with their property while they’re out. The debt collector appears not to be completely unscrupulous, and although he wants what he’s owed does not intend to resort to fair means or foul in order to get it.
Still, Zhengliang follows them everywhere – to school, to the local store, on the road behind them in his van when they walk. When the kids go off road through a forest, forcing him to follow them on foot, he dislocates a leg joint and ends up living in their house and paying the state employee calling for an overdue electric payment.
The creditor works his way into the children’s affections through the less confrontational Jinlong, and when he has to help Yinxiu take her little brother to the hospital with a stomach bug, finds himself paying the hospital bill which the kids, it turns out, can’t claim back because their state healthcare card isn’t paid up to date. Nevertheless, the girl is determined to pay him back for his kindness as soon as she can.
We learn something more about Zhengliang when we see that he, too, is being harassed by numerous creditors, which is why he needs to get back the money owed by the children’s absent father.
This is really a three-hander with fantastic performances from its three leads, who between them, alone or in twos or threes, are on the screen most of the time. Both kids are fantastic. Amy Zhao is a force of nature who completely makes us believe this young girl with a strong business sense who is also devoted to protecting her younger brother. The boy Liang Zhongyao is one of those kids who seems to light up the screen whenever a camera is pointed at him.
The role of the creditor who simply wants to be paid is a gift for Aaron Kwok, who embues his character with real humanity, changing our initial, pretty unpleasant perception of him to something much more sympathetic as the narrative unfolds and we see him almost stepping into the role of surrogate father to the kids.
Almost, because the final scene when he calls to visit, set against the snowbound background of Chinese New Year, sees him walking away from the kids, alone, into the landscape, as fireworks explode in the sky above him.
This is the first film I’ve watched in this year’s Critics Picks section, and it breaks the mould while maintaining the high standard of previous years. I can’t recall another entry that provided a role for a big international star actor like this. Generally speaking, so many big star vehicles are turgid, indulgent or vanity projects that they wouldn’t be appropriate. Not so in this case: IOU avoids all of those errors of judgement, instead delivering us three memorable character studies – one adult, two children – that prove genuinely affecting.
The film also boasts a rich and subtle score by composer Ke Ding.
IOU premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 30th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 6th to Sunday, November 2nd 2026.
This review originally appeared on DMovies.org: you can find it here.
Trailer:
Critics’ Picks mashup trailer:
Festival teaser trailer: