Toronto 2026 Review: Singaporean Drama AH GIRL Elevated by Assured New Director and Astonishing Young Lead

The debut feature from Singaporean writer-director Ang Geck Geck Priscilla is a semi-autobiographical story of a family’s separation, as seen through the eyes of a seven year old girl. Struggling to fully understand the gravity of the situation, and what the future will hold for both herself and her younger sister, Ah Girl lilts gently from moments of drama and sadness to others of playfulness and joyful innocence. 

 

Shot in 4:3 ratio and anchored by an astonishing central performance from first time actress Ong Xuan Jing, Ah Girl announces the debut of an impressively assured new voice in Asian cinema. Since bowing at the International Film Festival Rotterdam last January, where Ang was awarded the Youth Jury Award, the film has received further recognition at a number of events, with child star Ong scooping best actress prizes at both the Hong Kong and Malaysia International Film Festivals. Ah Girl now makes its North American debut at tiff.

 

Set in Singapore in 1994, Ah Girl introduces us to seven year old Swee Swee (Ong), known as “Ah Girl” by her family. She is a precocious, free-spirited youngster, who looks out for her boyish younger sister Ah Tian (Sydney Wong), and runs a successful racket selling contraband chewing gum to her classmates - as the confection had been banned in Singapore just a couple of years earlier. 

 

Ah Girl’s home life is in a state of major upheaval. Her parents have already separated. Their mother (Carrie Wong) has moved out, leaving their grandmother (Doreen Toh) to shoulder most of the parenting, while their deadbeat father (James Seah) lies around and womanises with a crop of different women. When asked who she would rather live with, mummy or daddy, Ah Girl is unable to answer - ill-equipped to fully comprehend, let alone make a ruling, on such a seismic decision. The youngster can do little more than get by as best she can, maybe even make a move on the little boy that she likes at school. But when Ah Girl gets wind that Ah Tian might be being palmed off onto another family that is moving to Australia, she makes a desperate plea to keep her family together.

 

While the film may be relatively light on incident, it is never lacking in emotional potency. Ang’s assured direction creates a wholly believable and resonant depiction of a crumbling home-life, bringing to the screen numerous moments of confusion, uncertainty and pain that resonate with a hard-earned sense of authenticity that can only have come from traumatic first-hand experience. 

 

Despite its heavy subject matter, Ah Girl succeeds in being as uplifting as it is challenging, as joyful as it is tearful, and credit for that must fall at the feet of the film’s two young female stars.  Ang’s demanding script requires both these fledgling performers to bear the full weight of the film’s emotional heft. Frequently the pair is on screen together, acting off one another without the guiding hand of more mature and experienced performers. 

 

Ong in particular is given a number of show-stopping scenes that demand a degree of vulnerability and inner strength that even the most experienced of performers would struggle to reach. Not least, the moment when Ah Girl is forced by her grandmother to get a haircut, a fate that she faces with defiant tearful silence, ranks as one of the year’s defining cinematic images. 

 

At a moment in time when Asian cinema feels flooded with female filmmakers desperate to unburden the hardships of their upbringing on the global movie-going public - films such as Shu Qi’s gritty directorial debut Girl and Tsou Shih-ching’s delightfully mischievous Left-Handed Girl to name just two - Ang Geck Geck Priscilla can stand proudly alongside these seasoned veterans, safe in the knowledge that her own story is every bit as compelling, and she has a growing global audience hungry for more.