Sweet Bitter Sweet (2026)
Nine minutes is barely any time at all to win someone over, yet Sweet Bitter Sweet, Nicolee Tsin's charming short film, manages it with room to spare. I caught it at the BFI London Film Festival and came out grinning, which is really the whole review in a sentence. It is a small, sweet, very funny thing, and I am happy to give it three stars, held back from more only by how little of it there is.
The setup is lovely and simple. A young Chinese woman has moved to London and is working in a bakery while quietly hoping to find love, and the film homes in on that universal, excruciating business of trying to make yourself seen by someone you fancy who has absolutely no idea you exist. Here the grand romantic gesture takes the form of a personalised cake modelled on the head of her crush, which is exactly the sort of earnest, slightly unhinged idea that feels painfully true to how it actually is when you are smitten and have no idea what to do about it.
What makes it sing is the central performance. Carmen Law in the lead is genuinely delightful, funny and expressive and immediately someone you are rooting for, and she carries the comedy with a lightness that never tips into mugging. The humour lands repeatedly, I laughed out loud more than once, and Tsin, a Hong Kong born, London based film-maker whose work keeps circling food, memory and modern romance, clearly has a real feel for the awkward comedy of longing.
It looks good too, bright and appetising in a way that suits its bakery setting, with ET Ng's photography and Patrick Jonsson's score keeping everything buoyant. For a film made on a student footing out of Arts University Bournemouth, it is impressively assured, the kind of calling card that makes you want to see what its director does with a bigger canvas.
Three stars, and a very fond three at that. My only real frustration with Sweet Bitter Sweet is that it is over almost as soon as it has got going, and I would happily have spent another twenty minutes in its company. As a quick, warm, genuinely amusing little charmer it is a joy, and I came away keen to watch whatever Nicolee Tsin and Carmen Law do next.
Related on Movies With Macca
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More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More comedy: Lady (2026), Please (2026), Micro Bangs (2026)
