Zhen ai ying ye (2025)

Review of “Liar, Liar, Let’s Get Married” (2025): a romantic comedy about fake love in the age of social media

“Liar, Liar, Let’s Get Married” / “Zhen ai ying ye” is a 2025 Chinese romantic comedy directed by Even Wu, in which a classic story about pretend relationships is moved into the world of bloggers, likes, live streams, and carefully constructed public images. At the center of the plot are Xu Xiaoli, a popular internet celebrity, and her fake boyfriend Hao Zha, who together portray the perfect couple for their followers.

Their romance initially exists not as a feeling, but as a media product. Smiles, dates, joint appearances, and romantic gestures work for reach, reputation, and commercial success. But the audience’s interest gradually fades, and the managers suggest a new way to win back public attention — staging a loud fake wedding live on air. This immediately sets up the film’s central conflict: where does the performance for the camera end, and where does real human intimacy begin?

The film’s premise is light and familiar: a fake couple must stage a wedding, but at the worst possible moment the groom runs away to his hometown. Xu Xiaoli goes after him to bring him back and save her career. However, instead of a quick solution to the problem, she finds herself surrounded by his family, everyday chaos, unfamiliar rules, and situations that cannot be fully controlled by scripts and marketing calculations.

“Liar, Liar, Let’s Get Married” works best as a comedy about the clash between the artificial and the real. The heroine is used to living in the mode of a beautiful picture, where every gesture can be rehearsed, reshot, or presented in a favorable light. But real life turns out to be far less obedient: relatives do not behave according to the script, feelings do not appear on schedule, and someone else’s home destroys the usual distance between a public role and personal vulnerability.

The film uses the popular fake relationship trope, but adds the modern context of influencer culture. Here, the deception is built not only between the characters, but also between them and their audience. Their love is sold as content, and the wedding turns into a show where a personal event is replaced by a performance for subscribers. That is why the romantic storyline feels not just like a game of “they pretended and fell in love”, but like a story about people who have been acting out emotions for so long that they have gradually forgotten what real ones look like.

The comedy is built on contrasts: the urban blogging environment collides with a more lively, noisy, and unpredictable family world. Xu Xiaoli has to not only bring back the runaway groom, but also understand why he refused to continue this game in the first place. In this structure, Hao Zha becomes not merely the object of pursuit, but a person tired of the role imposed on him by circumstances and other people’s expectations.

Despite the lightness of the genre, the film touches on a very relevant topic: addiction to attention. The heroes are afraid not so much of loneliness as of losing visibility. For them, disappearing from the feed, losing the audience’s interest, and becoming irrelevant is almost a professional catastrophe. Against this background, the romantic story gains an additional meaning: real relationships require not a perfect picture, but the willingness to be awkward, funny, confused, and imperfect.

Of course, the film remains within the framework of an audience-friendly romantic comedy and does not try to become a harsh satire of the digital age. Many turns are predictable, and the development of feelings between the characters follows a familiar formula. But it is precisely this genre simplicity that makes the film accessible and pleasant: the viewer understands the direction of the story in advance, but gets a light pace, comic situations, and a clear emotional arc.

“Liar, Liar, Let’s Get Married” (2025) is a light Chinese romantic comedy about fake love that gradually collides with real feelings. It is a film about bloggers, public images, family chaos, and the fact that sincerity cannot be performed perfectly even in front of the largest audience. The film will suit viewers who enjoy stories about fake relationships, wedding comedies, and romantic plots with gentle criticism of the world of social media.