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Early on in the remarkable documentary Mistress Dispeller by Hong Kong filmmaker Elizabeth Lo, one of the subjects captures a feeling everyone in a struggling relationship has had at some point – no one expects their marriage to fail.

Regardless of all the statistics bandied about around divorce or exposure to miserable couples who shouldn’t be together, everyone assumes they will make it. Or, as Mrs. Li puts it, “I can imagine an affair happening in any family but my own.”

“The two of us used to be so close,” she says of her husband. “Now it feels like there is an invisible sheet of paper between us, that my feelings are being blocked and I can’t reach out to him.”

Mrs. Li is speaking to Wang Zhengxi, the titular mistress dispeller, whom she hired in a last ditch attempt to save her marriage after her husband started a relationship with a younger woman he met through work, surnamed Zhou. Both women are only identified by their last names, one of several conditions they agreed to before participating in Ms. Lo’s film, including that it not be aired in mainland China.

Ms. Wang, referred to as “teacher” by her clients, is part-therapist, part-life coach to all three people in this crowded marriage. Only Mrs. Li knows the dispeller’s true identity as she inveigles herself into the lives of Mr. Li and Ms. Zhou, becoming their friend and confidant and pushing them inexorably toward ending their affair.

The mistress dispeller industry sprang up during China’s economic boom of the 2010s, at a time when divorce rates were skyrocketing. In a country where emperors once kept dozens of concubines, it was a common stereotype – if not necessarily reflective of reality – that rich men would have a mistress or two.

While many women responded to their husbands’ infidelity by divorcing them, this could often be costly. In China, property is often registered under the husband’s name, and older unmarried women, particularly divorced women, face social stigma that can make it difficult to find another partner.

Ms. Lo, the director of the film, says that while the concept may seem alien to Western audiences, hiring a mistress dispeller is a “form of empowerment for these women.”

“It’s answering a need by women to save their households, to reassert control, and to demand fidelity from their husbands, in an approach that is very non-confrontational and indirect and pragmatic,” she told The Globe and Mail.

Ms. Lo was inspired by Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s 1991 romance drama Raise the Red Lantern – which tells the story of a young woman who becomes a wealthy man’s fourth wife in 1920s China – to “look at love and family from the perspective of a mistress.”

Ms. Lo and her team then spent three years filming in China with various couples and mistress dispellers, until she found Ms. Wang and the Li family. The access she was able to get to both the married couple and Ms. Zhou is so unbelievable at times that Ms. Lo felt obliged to include a disclaimer at the start of the film that no scenes are fictionalized or staged. Often, to avoid influencing conversations between the mistress dispeller and her client, Ms. Lo would leave a camera running and watch the feed from another room.

“My Chinese producer and I met with several mistress dispellers. Some operated in the grey area of intimidation and seduction, they didn’t have the kind of close bonds with their clients that Teacher Wang does,” Ms. Lo says. “She stresses a very clear moral bottom line, no illegal tactics, very much considers herself a family counsellor.”

At one point in the film, Ms. Wang said she sees Ms. Zhou as her true client: “It seems like the wife is really hurt, but in reality, it’s the mistress who is in the most pain, she is the one who needs our help.” We see her coaching Ms. Zhou to have the confidence to leave Mr. Li, who the mistress knows is married and seems to suspect will never divorce his wife.

In the face of falling birth rates and a looming population crisis, China has restricted access to divorce and launched a spate of pro-natalist policies that many feminist activists see as rolling back hard-won freedoms.

As well as exploring the mistress dispelling industry, Ms. Lo’s documentary touches on the increasingly competitive dating market in China. She spent time filming with a dating coach and at a wilderness camp where young men learn self-worth and confidence to attract women.

China’s single population over the age of 15 hit a record 239 million in 2021. That same year, a survey by the Communist Youth League found that 44 per cent of female respondents had no intention to marry. Young women in China often express concern that they will lose financial independence or be expected to give up their careers if they tie the knot.

This trend is exacerbating a gender imbalance caused by the country’s now-abandoned one-child policy, which has resulted in a situation where there are 30 million more men than women as of 2021. Poorer men in particular often have scant marital prospects, and reports have linked this to a rise in human trafficking from neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia.

China remains deeply patriarchal, and in trying to depict this situation objectively, Ms. Lo says she was aware her film might be “polarizing.” She says that she attempted to approach everything with an open mind, without casting judgment on her participants or their actions.

“We were filming for three years, and during the course of that, I experienced different relationships, some of which fell apart,” she says. “It was so humbling, because I’m documenting people trying to maintain love, trying to find love, trying to sustain it or extricating themselves from it, and I myself have no answers about how to love and be loved.”