Sunshine Women's Choir (2025 film)

Category: Musical drama

Directed by: Gavin Lin

Similar to: Glee, but in a prison.

----

Regular readers and the bots that scrape this website will know that foreign language movies aren't really my thing - out of the 70 or so movies I've reviewed so far, only a handful have been foreign. Not out of hatred or anything, but just that one tends to feel more comfortable with the things they're familiar with. 

However, I can now add another foreign movie to the list - Sunshine Women's Choir, which marks my first Chinese-language movie. My wife wanted to see this since it had quite a bit of hype from its release in Taiwan, and look, discounted movie tickets and a night out with the family aren't the worst combination in history.

When I was told that we're seeing Sunshine Women's Choir, I initially thought it was about the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine - and yes, there is literally a suburb in Melbourne called Sunshine, named after the company that built a manufacturing hub in the suburb around WW1. A movie about a group of women from a working-class immigrant suburb forming a choir wouldn't have been a bad premise for a movie, but it turns out this movie is about a bunch of women in a prison who form a choir instead.

Let's get reviewing, shall we!

Plot (really badly explained):

Inside the northern women's prison of Taiwan (implying there's also a southern women's prison in Taiwan), the pregnant Hui-Zhen (Ivy Chen) gives birth and raises her daughter. In her cell (which looks more like a creche than a place where people do hard times) are three other women who help raise the girl - the more senior Yu Ying (Judy Ongg), the middle-aged Pei Ying (May Suen) who has a male pen pal/love interest on the outside, and Xiu Lan (Amber An).

A pretty newcomer, You Xin (Manxi Ho) comes in and is immediately bullied by the established women (so at least that part is realistic) until they decide to go easy on her after they come to the realisation they may have been a touch too hard. (May have? She was bullied for being new and pretty!) 

As a way of earning points that go towards their good behaviour record, the prison chief want the inmates to do some sort of end-of-year performance activity. Drama ensues as one group wants to dance and the other wants to sing. This leads to a prison yard dance off between the overweight Mei Li (who serves as comic relief and played by Chung Hsin Ling) and the young, pretty and flexible You Xin who wins the dance-off for the singing team (despite being full of the women that bullied her not too long ago). It just so happens that Yu Ying back in the day was a famous singer so she has the musical chops to be able to run a choir, and the guard Yu Wen can play piano. 

Adding to the drama is that the little child inside the prison has an eye condition that can't be treated inside the current environment, and Hui Zhen realises that maybe a prison isn't a good place for a child to be raised after all, so the Sunshine Women's Choir is formed as a final farewell to the girl before she is adopted out. As the women bond, we learn everyone's back stories - some of the women are in for murder, some in regards to prostitution and some for issues regarding fraud - and they essentially become the Glee club of the prison. Eventually, the choir performs for the prisoners and staff, and to placate both camps, the musical numbers includes dancing. The performance earns rave reviews. 

Fast-forward a year or so and the choir becomes notable enough that they are invited to perform for the department of corrections - but given this is an Asian drama movie, nothing is straightforward. The prisoners are faced with judgement as they get off the bus and walk into the building, and then while on a bathroom break, the women are accused of stealing an expensive ring and their performance is arbitrarily cancelled as they are stripsearched in the corridor. It is only when the ring is found back in the bathroom that the performance is uncancelled. During the performance itself, young children are invited on the stage to sing alongside the inmates. What do you know - the daughter that Hui Zhen had to give up performs alongside her mother!

But the movie doesn't end there - afterwards, Yu Ying succumbs to liver cancer and dies right before her estranged daughter can speak with her on her deathbed.

The movie finally comes to an end when we fast-forward a number of years and see that the daughter has grown up to become an adult with precocious musical ability. However, what she doesn't know is that the inmates of the prison have been watching over her and interacting with her for a long time. The daughter finally finds out that her mother was in for murder, and that she herself was killed in prison when someone tried to stab the chief warden.

The movie ends with the daughter performing a song in public.

-----

Wow! I was told this movie was going to be emotional and pull at the heartstrings and that everyone who saw it cried, but fuck me, this movie hits you over the head with the sads from the get-go and doesn't relent. Like, it really fucking hits you over the head. Repeatedly. Non-stop.

"Are you crying? No? Here's something sad!"

"Still not crying? Let's try this instead!

"How about now? How are you still not crying? BRING OUT THE BIG GUNS!"

I don’t mind if a movie has an emotional or sad premise behind it, but if you're going to deliberately concoct increasingly emotional scenarios, I want what I'm watching to be profound or to actually make a statement about something. Instead I felt like I was watching a series of set pieces gradually ramping up the emotional intensity for one reason and one reason only - make the audience cry! It got a bit much after a while, to be honest.

As a work of art, it wasn't too bad. It was well produced, and the ensemble cast played their roles well. However, and this may be a cultural thing, given that lots of people had fairly similar names, I struggled to follow things at times.

Musical production deserved a nod, though - pretty good job there. But on that note, the songs themselves didn't really do it for me - it may well be that there is a cultural barrier as well as a linguistic one that prevented me from understanding the gravitas and cultural spirit of the musical numbers. The songs are essentially all about dealing with struggle and hope and finding a way forward. If you're familiar with Asian movie styles and tropes, you'll be right at home with what you're seeing and listening to.

But dancing? As someone who does not understand the medium of dance one bit, I feel for the performers who had to do repeated takes of their dance moves from different camera angles. It just felt weird. That, however, may be more about my lack of appreciation for dance as a medium than anything else. 

One thing that irked me a bit was the gender imbalances presented. Essentially, none of the women are truly evil - they were merely forced into their crimes, be it out of self-preservation or some other hopeless situation because of something a man did to them. One woman murdered her husband because he was abusive. Another murdered her pimp because he was abusive. Another went in to prostitution because she was raised poor. The consequence of all this is that almost every male character is a scumbag of some sort. The husband and son of one of the women is presented as supportive, the head of the prison is somewhat stern (though fair), but that's about it. But none of the women did what they did because they're sociopaths or antisocial or whatever - they're merely victims.

Now, I shouldn't complain about realism in a movie like this, but as someone who has worked in a corrections environment and has an understanding of the justice system and the people in it, it just feels weird that one, a child is being raised on the inside, and two, that in the end, all the women end up being cuddly and lovely and supportive.

Highly unrealistic...

STAR RATING: 3.25/5