Final Rating: 4/5
Contact Lens begins with an unnamed woman putting in a contact lens as an alarm sound repeats in the background. As the lens coats her eye, there’s a camera click and the world around her slowly comes into focus. She leaves the bathroom and screams “I know!” at her microwave, opening the door to stop the alarm. When she sits down to have breakfast, she does so across from a projection of a film she made: a woman in a small kitchen doing chores.
Lu Ruiqi’s debut follows a woman who lives a quiet life of routine, expressing herself through filmmaking. Each day she screams “I know” at the microwave, makes her bed in the exact same way, and eats the exact same breakfast, all as the woman in the projection looks on. When she leaves her apartment, she brings a video camera to record people going about their lives, or the nature around her city.
Contact Lens interrogates the relationship between reality and media, between what is seen and what is felt. Scenes outside the woman’s apartment are seen almost entirely through camcorder footage spliced between more professional shots. The woman in the projection interacts like a housemate, relegated to the screen, but nevertheless responsive to sights and sounds from the woman’s apartment.
On occasion, the barrier between reality and artifice is breached. The camcorder will be put down to reveal the world in higher-definition, or the woman in the projection will leave to explore the apartment. One scene even frames the apartment within what looks like a projection screen, as if to frame the act of watching Contact Lens in the same voyeuristic way as the woman watching her counterpart in the projection.
As a commentary on viewership, Contact Lens is in conversation with other well-known films. Most notably, the woman in the projection wears the same outfit and hair, sits in the same apartment, and lives out a version of the same routine as Delphine Seyrig in Chantal Akerman’s 1976 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
Akerman’s film shows a woman living out a regimented, methodical schedule – deviating from it at her own peril. Contact Lens shows a woman aspiring to that regimented, methodical schedule, placing her own life in direct conversation with Akerman’s period and art. Like Dielman, the woman’s life is routine to the point that any change becomes difficult. Unlike Dielman, the woman’s routine is never quite comfortable.
Every day, when the doorbell of the apartment rings, the woman in the projection – not-Jeanne Dielman – attempts to answer, slamming into the lens filming her as a part of her routine.
The other woman, when she goes out to film, tries to befriend the people she films, but has difficulty interacting with them beyond what her camera can capture.
In 2025, the expectations on women are significantly different, but no less suffocating, than in 1976. In Jeanne Dielman, one break from Dielman’s routine is all it takes for her entire life to begin to unravel. In Contact Lens, breaks from routine are common, though the women always return.
Several times, the woman from the projection simply leaves to explore the apartment, sometimes even directly interacting with the woman in the apartment. The woman in the apartment, likewise, occasionally enters the projection, just to explore that world. Until quite late in the film, there’s little to imply explicit animosity between them, more a simple curiosity about how the other lives.
While Contact Lens explores the feeling of being trapped as a young woman in the 21st century, it also interrogates what that prison looks like. If the women are free to leave their respective spaces, is their isolation fully self-imposed?
Ultimately, the lives of the women unravel nonetheless, but the path they take is more opaque. Dreamlike, even.
Contact Lens was seen during the 2025 Fantasia Festival. Thank you to the festival for the screener.
