MUMU (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

MuMu, Well Go USA

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | April 17, 2025

The girl and the father at the center of MuMu live an odd but still fulfilling life. He's a man with a hearing impairment, and as a single father, he makes money as simply and quickly as he can, running an illegal mahjong gambling operation out of the community center where he and the daughter, who can hear, live with a group of other deaf people.

Here's a movie that's stronger and more affecting when it keeps things simple. Initially, Dandi Fu's screenplay is about the bond between Xiao Ma (Lay Zhang) and his 7-year-old daughter Mu Mu (Li Luoan), a child who probably knows a bit too much about the cruel realities of the world for being so young but doesn't let that keep her from being, well, a kid.

She's smart for her age, to be sure, helping her dad organize and run his harmless but criminal enterprise, and when things become hairy because of a bad bet or someone losing too much money, all Mu Mu has to do to lower tempers is enter the room. Few people want to continue a fight when a kid is present, and nobody, it seems, wants to have or is capable of having a bad mood when Mu Mu's bright, smiling face is around. The girl seems to know this, too, because, above everything else about her, she's empathetic.

That's the real heart of director Sha Mo's drama. It's warm and compassionate for a long stretch, until it eventually becomes melodramatic, focused on an assortment of conflicts that come between the father and his daughter, and patronizing about people with hearing impairments in a way that goes against way it presents this familial duo from the start. For a story that takes so much time in showing us that this bond is just as loving and "normal" as any other parent-child relationship, it really lays on the notion that there's something universal and universally helpless about deaf people by its finale.

We'll leave that change in story and tone for later, because there really is a lot to appreciate about the movie up to that shift. Mu Mu's first introduction is of her as an adult (played by Zhang Rounan), a sign language interpreter working within the legal system. She has been assigned to translate for a deaf woman accused of stealing money from her boss, and after realizing there might be more to the case, a cop asks the interpreter how she knows sign language and why she does this work.

Most of the narrative, then, is a flashback to Mu Mu's childhood, which is spent in close connection to her father. He's a man doing the best he can under the circumstances of raising a daughter on his own for the past five years, following the departure the girl's mother, and Mu Mu wouldn't have it any other way, even though it means that she doesn't go to school and doesn't spend too much time with other hearing people.

The mother, named Jing and played by Huang Yao, returns, though. At first, she just wants to give her ex-husband some money to help with Mu Mu's care, but in a misunderstanding that starts everything into a spiral, Ma believes his ex wants custody of their daughter. He goes looking for a lawyer, which leads him to take a legitimate job at a hotel and unwittingly into a criminal enterprise that exploits deaf people to commit insurance fraud.

Here is the bittersweet portrait of a man who will do anything for his daughter, even if it puts him in peril, and a girl whose first priority is making sure that her father is safe, because she knows firsthand how the world can treat someone with his disability differently. The two central performances are quite sympathetic, with Zhang, a professional singer, making Ma into a fully realized character beyond the man's disability and the young Li, in her movie debut, serving as the story's heartbreaking core in a difficult role.

It's when everything surrounding these characters and this relationship, especially the stuff with the criminal organization and its scam to receive insurance money by having deaf people intentionally crash cars, takes over that the movie loses its way. Things go from bad to worse in short order, leading to Ma destroying his own body, to Mu Mu trying to figure out why her father is always injured and tired, and, ultimately, to a couple of legal matters that put the relationship and the father's fate in jeopardy. One court proceeding is typically more than enough for a story to become overwhelmed by that process, and Mo's decision to force two of them upon this tale only overshadows its grounded, slice-of-life way even more.

Because the relationship is so strongly developed before that point, we could accept the plot turns, perhaps, if not for how the final message of MuMu seems to turn on its head with a couple of Big Speeches. The lesson of them isn't the one the movie has shown us until then—about how Ma's hearing impairment doesn't change anything about his love for Mu Mu or vice versa. Instead, it bluntly announces that people like the father are different, fit some universal mold, and need protection—as much from themselves as from other people. It's simply the wrong point to make here.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products