The Forbidden City Review: When Martial Arts, Noir, and Forbidden Love Collide

Yaxi Liu commands the screen in Gabriele Mainetti’s genre-bending martial arts thriller The Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City Review — Genre Collision with Fists, Fate, and Forbidden Love

Rating: 3 / 5

Gabriele Mainetti doesn’t dabble in genre—he stacks it, collides it, and lets it fight itself. The Forbidden City, one of the most talked-about crowd favorites out of Fantastic Fest last year, is a full-on genre crossover that blends martial arts cinema with Italian crime drama, romance, and melodrama. Somehow, against the odds, it mostly works.

Released stateside by Well Go USA Entertainment, the film follows Mei (played by Yaxi Liu), a young woman searching for her missing sister—who has been trafficked and exploited. Tragedy strikes when Mei learns her sister and the man she loved attempted to escape their circumstances, only for both to end up dead. From that moment, The Forbidden City pivots into something messier, stranger, and more emotionally tangled.

Mei crosses paths with Marcello (Enrico Borello), the son of the man her sister loved. He’s a lonely chef, deeply tethered to his mother Lorella, played with seasoned gravitas by Sabrina Ferilli. Lorella’s role in the unfolding events is complicated, morally thorny, and central to why everything went wrong in the first place.

What you end up with is something that feels like a soap opera filtered through kung fu cinema: part love story, part revenge thriller, part noir crime drama, part martial arts showcase. It’s a lot—and yes, at times it feels jammed together. But Mainetti surrounds the chaos with enough emotional context and backstory to keep the narrative from collapsing under its own ambition.

Where the film absolutely shines is the kung fu.

Yaxi Liu is a seasoned action and stunt performer, and The Forbidden City finally gives her space to command the screen. The choreography is sharp, physical, and grounded, with fight scenes that feel purposeful rather than ornamental. This is only her second starring role, but she carries the film’s physical demands with confidence—and it shows why she has a long future ahead in action cinema.

What may not work for everyone is how quickly the film shifts gears. One moment, it’s a gritty noir crime story flirting with murder mystery territory. The next, it’s leaning hard into a forbidden romance that becomes the emotional backbone of the film. That thematic throughline—what isn’t allowed—echoes throughout, but the tonal whiplash may test some viewers’ patience.

Still, there’s something admirable about the attempt. The Forbidden City isn’t afraid to be messy, emotional, or earnest. It wants to tell a story about love that society refuses, violence born from desperation, and the cost of trying to escape predetermined roles.

I wanted a little more—more weight, more cohesion, maybe a bit more restraint—but I can’t deny that it’s entertaining, ambitious, and often thrilling. Mainetti keeps the plates spinning better than expected, and even when it stumbles, it does so with conviction.

A respectable, genre-blending effort that delivers where it counts most—especially when the fists start flying.

ARRIVING ON DIGITAL MARCH 17th