This is probably not sufficient to convince you that Gabriele Mainetti’s The Forbidden City is one of my favourite movies of the year, but I’m just going to start with a non-exhaustive list of items used as weapons in the film’s spectacular, and spectacularly brutal, action sequences:

• A pot of boiling oil
• A wok and several other pots and pans
• A cheese grater
• A bouquet of roses
• Knitting needles
• A CD
• A fish
• A large slab of pork belly

If it weren’t for the next-level choreography, innovation and breakneck pace of Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious, which I caught at TIFF in 2025 and which is being released soon (if its new trailer is any indication), The Forbidden City would be a very likely contender for my favourite action movie of 2025, and (keeping recency bias in mind) generally the best since my two favourites – The Raid (2011) and The Night Comes For Us (2018). Its action sequences are a little more spread out in comparison to The Furious, but there’s so much more emotion and depth behind those sequences that gives each hit an added gravity. This is largely owing to the unexpectedly tender and layered love story that’s also broadly about the value and wholeness of family and loyalty in between those kung fu-centric sequences. 

Mei (Yaxi Liu) has been brought up in secret under the Chinese government’s oppressive one-child policy. In defiance of this restriction,  which was in place from 1979 until 2015, Mei’s parents kept her and her sister Yun hidden from officials while training them to be elite practitioners of kung-fu, in case they’re ever discovered. Years later, Yun has disappeared to Italy for unknown reasons, compelling Mei to undertake a mission to track her down. 

On the other side of the world, Marcello’s (Enrico Borello) family is also fractured. His father Alfredo has abandoned him and his mother Lorena (Sabrina Ferilli) to take up with a younger woman. Lorena remains hopeful that Alfredo will come back, and she and Marcello continue to run the family restaurant even though Marcello is a little more realistic. He confides in his father’s best friend Annibale (Marco Giallini) who, in a bit of a weird dynamic, is all-too-available to step in as a surrogate mentor to Marcello and, perhaps, something more to Lorena. We’ll soon find out that any suspicions you might have of Annibale’s motives are very much warranted. 

Mei is trafficked to Italy with a group of other women, destined for a restaurant/brothel called La Città Proibita in Rome’s Chinatown. Mei easily breaks free and forces one of the goons keeping the women captive to lead her to her sister’s dead body, right next to that of Alfredo. 

 La Città Proibita is run by underworld crime boss Wang (Shanshan Chunyu). Wang is, for a guy running a brothel and who is the catalyst for most of the underlying tragedy in The Forbidden City, weirdly charming. Keeping with the film’s theme of unusual parent-child relationships, Wang’s very proud of his estranged son, a burgeoning rapper, and takes great pleasure in showing off his CD and bragging that he raps in Italian. It’s, in fact, at his son’s concert that Mei and Wang have their big showdown and Wang gets his ass handed to him so thoroughly that he’s near death.  About to succumb to his injuries, Wang reveals to Mei both the nature of Yun’s relationship with – surprise! – Alfredo and the circumstances of both of their deaths, tying things back to Marcello’s family. 

It’s nowhere close to the first time a movie like this – action or otherwise – has used an often colonialist at best and racist at worst trope of a foreigner in a fish-out-of-water situation, but Mainetti’s story deftly dodges the usual traps. The unexpected elegance by which he brings Mei and Marcello together, uniting them against Wang and Annibale (especially the latter, who becomes one of the more detestable characters I’ve seen in a movie in a while) while also underpinning their conflict by making it clear that neither of our leads want to be there, feels subversive. Marcello’s desire to break free of the restaurant, and then the complicated and harmful loyalty he has to his family, is matched by Mei’s feeling of being an outsider both in Rome and in China where her very existence is illegal. 

As the list above is meant to convey, one of the most fun things about The Forbidden City’s action sequences is the feeling that everything can be a weapon. That’s an idea that has always tickled me, whether it comes in the form of someone being beaten asunder with a trash can lid or a light tube in a wrestling match, or absolutely wrecking a goon with a bicycle or a road pylon in the Yakuza games. Sure, anyone can commit aggravated assault with a knife or gun, but it takes real ingenuity to do so with a large piece of uncooked meat or a bunch of flowers, as Mei does early in the film. Her style is most indicative of ruthless efficiency, rarely wasting a moment or a motion. And, boy howdy, does Liu’s Mei bring it. A stuntwoman by trade, Liu is more than capable of performing her own bone-crunching, athletic feats as she kicks her way through the streets of Rome. Rare is there an action star that can deliver the kind of range that she does, in both her complex choreography in her fight sequences and between them, when she has to express the crushing loss of her sister and the growing romantic bond between Mei and Marcello. This is made even more difficult, and remarkable that it works so well, by the fact that both characters speak completely different languages and have to use facial expressions to do a lot of the work.

Setting the story in modern-day Rome imbues The Forbidden City with a different aura and atmosphere that most other action movies don’t muster. I love a neon-lit, rain-soaked alley as much as anyone but it’s a nice change of pace to set a fight in an Italian street too. And not just fights. Between the kicks and ingenious use of unconventional weaponry, there’s beautifully-shot sequences showing off the city’s natural beauty, like a lovely scene of Marcello driving Mei around the city on his scooter that, like so much of this movie, feels like it’s from an entirely different film.

If I have a note about The Forbidden City, it’s that it gives Alfredo a little too easy a pass for ditching out on his family and hooking up with Yun at 65 years old. Love comes at you fast and when and where you least expect it, the movie seems to say (and does, with Mei and Marcello’s relationship), and we take great pains to understand that Alfredo had genuine love for Yun, but it’s hard to look past the smarm of it all. An early scene with poor Lorena, mourning the death of her relationship (before learning of Alfredo’s actual death) and lamenting not having taken advantage of the many opportunities for love over the years is a little heartbreaking to me. 

But maybe that’s part of the package when we have characters that are so layered and complicated throughout Mainetti’s film. Sure, the action sequences alone would be plenty to carry The Forbidden City on their own with the barest minimum of plotting to string them together. Lots of action films – most of my favourites – are content to leave it at that, and I usually love them for (or in spite of) that because I often itch for them to get to the kick and stab factory. But Mainetti and his cast are aiming for something more ambitious here. From Mei and Marcello to even tertiary characters like Lorena, Wang, and Annibale, their motives and their impulses are deeply layered and add so much richness to what could have been a straight-ahead kung fu outing. LIke the pasta water that adds depth and flavour to a sauce, the emotion, tragedy, and love behind the bone-crunching hits and unconventional weapons in The Forbidden City set it apart from the usual fast food fare. The end result is a dish of unexpected tenderness and beauty to offset the ugliness and brutality it portrays elsewhere.

Sachin Hingoo has an intense craving for a bowl of noodles. And possibly an entire pork belly.

Gabriele Mainetti’s The Forbidden City is currently available to buy or rent on Digital from Well Go USA. I saw it as part of the After Dark Film Festival lineup, as well as from a review screener.