The Dating Game, 2025 documentary from China

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In a country where eligible men greatly outnumber women, three perpetual bachelors join an intensive seven-day dating camp led by one of China's most sought-after dating coaches in what may be their last-ditch effort to find love.

The Wild Ways Chinese Men Try to Find Wives

The fascinating new documentary “The Dating Game” is a fun look into a social crisis: Men in China outnumber women by 30 million. How are they supposed to find a match?

In China, where men now outnumber women by 30 million thanks to the country’s former one-child policy, finding a wife may not be a no-holds-barred, to-the-death battle royale, but it’s close. With female spouses in short supply, and thus in incredibly high demand, the nation is undergoing what might generously be called a monumental social crisis, and one of the results has been the explosive re-emergence of an old-school industry: matchmaking.

Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, The Dating Game is an illuminating look at a superpower in the throes of a burgeoning cultural catastrophe—and of a few of its myriad desperate-for-love men. For a steep price, young (and not-so-young) guys take lessons with supposed experts, and in Violet Du Feng’s documentary, that pro is Hao, who promises his clients that they’ll achieve their dream by following his surefire techniques. Over the course of Hao’s seven-day camp, however, what they discover is that it’s immensely hard to stand out in a crowd this enormous—and, perhaps, that the path to contentment may involve doing precisely the opposite of what their new teacher counsels.


In Chongqing, dating coach Hao goes clothes shopping with a trio of students—36-year-old Zhou, 24-year-old Li, and 27-year-old Wu—and his attempt to deck them out in bright, flashy clothes is one of many ways he believes he can make them conspicuous and attractive to potential mates.

As it turns out, he has an uphill climb, since Zhou is an unsure adult who’s already viewed as too old by most women, Li is an immature kid whose shyness is an impediment to approaching strangers, and Wu is an intensely quiet and withdrawn individual, in large part because he grew up in a rural town that was populated exclusively by boys. Thanks to China’s heavily skewed demographics and trends—including the fact that their generation’s parents abandoned them to work in metropolises—they’re almost totally ignorant of women, of romantic relationships, and of love. Having no social standing doesn’t help either.

Further hurting their cause, they don’t make much money and, as Hao tells them in shockingly blunt fashion, they aren’t attractive or charismatic. His strategy for overcoming these shortcomings is indoctrinating them with the methods he’s pioneered over the past few years, and which he employed to woo his wife Wen, who’s also a dating coach.

Among those tricks of the trade is Hao’s patented “Push and Pull” technique, in which a man compliments a date, then immediately insults her, and—if this yo-yoing isn’t well-received—finally plays it off like a joke. He additionally advises them to suddenly cut off text conversations mid-chat in order to test a date’s reaction; if she continues to communicate with you, she likes you, whereas if she severs all contact, it means you weren’t a good fit.


Unsurprisingly, Zhou, Li, and Wu view these lessons with more than a bit of skepticism, with Wu opining that “techniques are only good when we’re not good enough.” That’s precisely Hao’s point, however, and he’s not completely incorrect.

In multiple scenes, Hao takes the threesome to a bustling shopping area and cajoles them into randomly approaching women and asking if they can link up on WeChat. In practically every instance, they fail miserably, both because this plan is awkward and terrible, and because they lack the charm that might lead to success. Consequently, they spend most of the film falling short of their objectives, no matter that they try their best to process what Hao recommends, including by heeding his regular orders to write down his nuggets of wisdom.


The Dating Game isn’t just about Hao’s clients; it’s about him and his conviction that the sole way to shine brightly is to pretend to be something you’re not. “It’s all performance art,” he proclaims while scrolling through Photoshopped dating profiles. Be that as it may, the fakery he promotes is so inauthentic that it’s doomed.

In a surprisingly sharp back-and-forth, Wen tells her husband that his techniques are “stupid” and that his obsession with duplicity and transformation have made her reconsider her feelings about him (“You’ve lost what attracted me to you. I feel suffocated. You’ve been poisoned by those techniques”). Still, despite Hao’s wrong-headed worldview, Du Feng’s doc illustrates that it’s an inevitable response to a national calamity that has everyone scrambling to get hitched before they’re left behind, alone and unhappy—which then drives countless singles to enlist in China’s military.

Although men are the primary focus of The Dating Game, women aren’t ignored; in a thoroughly unnerving sequence, Du Feng addresses the growing popularity of virtual dating games, which afford players the opportunity to have the perfect relationship—except, of course, for the fact that the guy isn’t real.

“I have little interest in finding a boyfriend in real life,” says one female gamer, highlighting how China’s screwy circumstances have led to an epidemic of fantasy role-playing, deception, and depersonalization. In such an environment, there’s little hope for genuine connection, and the director highlights the phony superficiality governing the country’s dating scene (and culture) via numerous glimpses of glamorous models staring down at citizens from towering billboards...