When "Lovesick" debuted on Netflix, tracking down its IMDb listing felt like participating in a digital scavenger hunt. Type the title in and you'll get everything but this Taiwanese gem. To find it, you'll need to Google "lovesick taiwanese film" and click through the sidebar or enter its Taiwanese original title on IMDB-You bing cai hui xi huan ni-which, by the way, features two leads with the exact same name: Ye Zijie. A homophonic twist that's never milked for comedy, but quietly deepens the film's meditation on projection, identity, and the emotional chaos of adolescence.
The story runs on a single bad idea: Jay (Ye Zijie) fakes cancer to dodge punishment at school. Jade (also Ye Zijie), the class monitor and trauma survivor, sees through him. What follows is part screwball comedy, part emotional chess match, and part study in how two people with the same name try to overwrite each other's stories without realizing they're starring in the same play.
Is it perfect? Not at all. Some of the jokes lean into broad slapstick-hallway pratfalls, exaggerated faces, the kind of humor that feels air-dropped from a different movie. For those of us raised on a steady diet of My So-Called Life and free-floating dread, it can feel a little cringe. Then again, so did most of our high school years.
Where Lovesick really lands is in its emotional architecture. Jay's lie isn't just adolescent; it's a desperate attempt to be seen in a world that only listens when you're visibly wounded. That resonates for anyone who grew up with "don't talk about it" parenting and learned to express emotion sideways-through sarcasm, mixtapes, or disappearing for a weekend. Jade, meanwhile, is the sort of character Gen-X once dismissed as "intense" but now reads as quietly heroic. She doesn't perform empathy; she practices it, with surgical precision and zero patience for nonsense.
Growing up in Taiwan, I remember the cinematic gravitas of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang-films elliptical, devastating, and transcendent. But some nights you don't want transcendence. You want distraction with a heartbeat. You want Hong Kong '80s action, early-2000s K-dramas, or-lately-Taiwanese films that entertain without dumbing down. Lovesick fits that lane. So does "Dead Talents Society," another Netflix import worth its own review.
Yes, the film is messy. It's emotionally manipulative. It's occasionally ridiculous. But it's also honest in ways that sneak up on you. Love Sick understands that sometimes the most authentic thing you can do is admit you've been pretending. And for those of us who grew up masking feelings with irony and distraction, that lands harder than any final-act twist.
