Venice 2026: Big Little Things (dir. Michelle Zhou) | Review
Two roses, close and wounded — their thorns catching at each other. Director Michelle Zhou holds us close to the small, fragile spaces of same-sex love, while the larger world presses in with its own sharp edges, all against an Asian dilemma backdrop.
The year is 2026, with all its progress and transformation, yet one of the major things we still lack is the ability to love a person for who they are and what they choose to be. Whether it’s a trait, a nation, or a political stance, everyone’s opinion is rarely considered, as it always seems to need validation, approval, and reinforcement. What’s worse is the absence of a platform when it matters most. Director Michelle Zhou takes a pinch of these arguments and creates a love story — one that doesn’t just show fragile ties but reaches into what keeps two people tethered when everything trembles.
Xiao Lei (Cuishan Liang) and Li Bei (Jialing Sun) share a house, a bed, a life — but to the world, they are just roommates. Their love is kept in the dark, hidden from friends and family, buried under phone calls from Lei’s mother (Ling Hu), who doesn’t know. So, Lei plans. She finds Chen Yao (Bin Yu), a tattoo artist, and asks him to play the part of her boyfriend. A pact is made. But in the shadows of a double life, is any pact ever safe?
I’ll admit — films about same-sex love and its weight have been told in countless ways. Yet everyone holds its own light, its own fragility, and opens a door we haven’t walked through. Here, in the hands of director Zhou, the screenplay becomes something tender and new. The director deploys a dual framework of pressure: firstly, the pressure emanating from Lei and the family, which tests her patience and her capacity to sustain her relationship while pursuing personal desires. Secondly, the pressure generated by the repercussions of Lei, which are projected onto Bei. Ultimately, beneath the affective layer of love and memory, structural fractures remain. Arguments happen (they always do), but they find their way back to each other. This is about difficult family ties and the patience they demand, the constant balancing act that never quite steadies. The director uses tension like a release valve, letting out what everyone’s been hiding — fear, insecurity, fragility, where it feels like a representation of same-sex vulnerability in modern Asia.
Zhou doesn’t stop there. She pushes deeper on how lovers sink into the heart of what holds them, through Liang and Sun’s layered performances. The good, the bad, the ugly — they’re all there, never stale, always pressing. A familiar rhythm, but it hums with mystery. And as we watch the lovers, and even the parents, we are led into the quiet spaces of connection, tender and complex. At times, it evoked another Venice Film Festival selection this year, House of the Wind by Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu, which similarly features a pact. This strikes me as a contemporary survival strategy — a means by which individuals endure external pressures. It may be a shortcut, yet something is preferable to nothing. Another notable highlight is the background score by Gang Yu, which ranks among the best I have encountered this year. A variety of instruments are deployed across different scenes, each carrying a distinct melodic identity, and they contribute significantly to the film’s atmospheric coherence.
Orizzonti selection Big Little Things is a complex portrait layered with lots of care and precision that examines how relationships rarely follow a predictable trajectory toward stability, while simultaneously illuminating the sustained effort and sacrifice necessary for their maintenance. Family love bends and twists — its stakes hidden in the folds. This might be the Asian way — pressure sewn into care, depression growing quietly inside. The question lingers — do we not see it, or do we choose not to? Even now, in this modern world, it remains a silence we keep. Produced by Chun Yu, the film reminds us that plans are fragile, the future always has other ideas. Faith is a big word for it. I’d call it adaptation — a kind of radar tuned to change. The details that produce outcomes are accessible only to those who attend, listen, and observe.
When Lei’s father (Hai Yu) asks, “How are you?” Lei is puzzled — as if she misheard him. He insists and asks again, “I’m asking, how are you?” A moment of silence follows. A moment of inner pain. A quiet moan of sorrow passes through them both. Tears well up, but the subject changes. Yet the wet breeze flows harder within them. These small gestures, the things that make us human — are as huge as the universe itself. And they carry us forward, wherever we can go.
The 83rd edition of the Venice International Film Festival is running on September 2-12, 2026.
