There is a scene in Wet Season that has stayed with me.
The rain is pouring. The city is grey. Ling (Yang Yanyan) is sitting in her car, alone, injecting a fertility hormone into her stomach. It's something she's done many times before. She doesn't flinch. She just looks ahead, through the windshield, into nothing.
This scene lasts maybe a minute. It's not dramatic. It's not sentimental. But it tells you everything you need to know about this film: that life can be lonely even when you're not alone, and that sometimes the quietest people are the ones carrying the heaviest weight.
Wet Season is a Singaporean film directed by Anthony Chen, his second feature after the acclaimed Ilo Ilo (2013). It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019 and won Yang Yanyan the Golden Horse Award for Best Actress. It is a film about loneliness, about the longing for connection, and about the suffocating weight of cultural expectation.
It is also a film about rain. Lots of it.
A Life Stuck in the Rain
Ling (Yang Yanyan) is a Chinese language teacher in Singapore. She moved from Malaysia to marry her husband (Li Mingshun), and she has been living in a quiet state of disappointment ever since.
Her marriage is crumbling. She and her husband have been trying for a child for eight years, without success. She is the primary caregiver for her stroke-afflicted father-in-law. And at school, her subject is treated as an afterthought — an irrelevant relic in a system that prioritizes English, math, and science.
She is, in other words, invisible. She does everything right, and no one seems to notice.
Then there is her student, Wei Lun (Xu Jiale). He is a teenager who is more interested in martial arts than in Chinese characters. He's failing his Chinese class. He needs help. She agrees to tutor him after school.
What begins as a simple tutoring arrangement slowly becomes something else. He drives her home. She listens to his problems. He gives her a smile that is pure and innocent and completely free of expectation. And in the oppressive, relentless heat and humidity of Singapore's monsoon season, something begins to shift.
They have an affair. It is not romantic, exactly. It is desperate. It is two lonely people finding a brief moment of warmth in a cold and indifferent world.
The Rain as a Character
In Wet Season, the rain is not just a background detail. It is a character. It sets the mood. It tells us how to feel.
The film opens with the rain. It closes with the rain. It fills every scene with a sense of dampness, of heaviness, of something that never quite dries out.
Director Anthony Chen has said that he wanted to capture Singapore's monsoon season because it reflected the emotional state of his protagonist. The rain is oppressive, but it is also cleansing. It traps people inside their homes and inside themselves, but it also creates a kind of intimacy — a forced proximity that makes connection possible.
One of the most powerful scenes in the film takes place in a car during a downpour. Ling and Wei Lun are stuck in traffic. The rain is pounding against the roof. She is stressed, overwhelmed. He reaches out and touches her hand. She doesn't pull away.
It's a small moment. A quiet moment. But it says more than any dialogue could.
The Stealing of a Secret
There is a scene near the end of the film that I think about often.
Ling takes Wei Lun to the hospital to visit her father-in-law. He is dying. She tries to explain the situation to him, but he doesn't seem to understand. He is young. He is full of life. He cannot grasp the concept of death.
He sits on a chair in the hospital room, playing with his phone, oblivious to the weight of the moment.
This is the film's central tragedy: Ling is trying to hold together a world that is falling apart, and the people around her cannot see it. She is caring for a dying man, dealing with a failing marriage, and navigating an inappropriate relationship with a student — all while trying to maintain a facade of normalcy.
She is drowning. And no one is throwing her a life raft.
The final scene of the film takes place in Malaysia, Ling's home country. It's sunny. She is smiling. She has left her husband, left her job, left her life in Singapore behind. She is finally free.
But the rain has followed her. She is still damp. She is still carrying the weight of everything that happened.
Why It Resonates
Wet Season is not a film about happy endings. It is a film about surviving. It is about the small, quiet moments of connection that make life bearable, and the impossible choices we make when we are desperate for warmth.
Yang Yanyan's performance is extraordinary. She is restrained, subtle, and achingly human. She doesn't shout or scream. She doesn't break down. She just carries on, because that is what women do.
Xu Jiale is also excellent as Wei Lun. He is young, awkward, and completely unprepared for the situation he finds himself in. He is not a predator. He is a boy who is lonely and confused, and who finds himself drawn to the only person who has ever shown him kindness.
The film is also a sharp critique of Singaporean society. It captures the country's obsession with productivity, its casual neglect of the elderly, its distrust of emotion, and its complicated relationship with the Chinese language.
There is a scene where Ling is told that her Chinese class has been canceled so the students can study for a more "important" subject. She doesn't argue. She just nods, and leaves the room.
This is the quiet devastation that runs through every frame of Wet Season.
Final Thoughts
Wet Season is not a comfortable film. It is slow. It is melancholy. It is full of awkward silences and unspoken emotions.
But it is also a film of rare beauty and empathy. It is a film that sees the people who are invisible — the teachers, the caregivers, the wives who are doing everything right and getting nothing in return.
It is a film that reminds us that loneliness is not a failure. It is a condition. And sometimes, all we can do is hold on to each other and wait for the rain to pass.
Have you seen Wet Season? What did you think of the relationship between Ling and Wei Lun? Let me know in the comments.
Tom De · The Movie Prince 🎬
Comments
Post a Comment