The Sadness (2021)

directed by Robert Jabbaz

Taiwan

99 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

(I wrote this review shortly after this movie came out in May of last year, and I was very enthused about it at the time, but now, revisiting it, I feel the need to rework it slightly. Especially knowing that the director has stated he was not interested in the political dimensions of the film and only wanted to show gore - that goes against, and somewhat spoils, my image of the film. I'm beginning to think most of what I got out of this movie was in spite of the director's intent rather than because of it. I also have read criticism of this as being an empty, try-hard portrayal of violence for violence's sake, and I think there's a point to that. But I do also remember how much I liked the movie the first time I watched it, and so I'm keeping a lot of my enthusiasm intact, although taking it with a grain of salt now.)

I was extremely excited for this one based off of the strength of the fan response; it seems like all I hear is talk of it being the most brutal film somebody or other has seen. But I was also trying to tamp down my expectations, because essentially the same thing happened surrounding The Medium when it came out, and that was a disappointment and a half. However, in this case, The Sadness lives up to the hype. It achieves its brutality specifically because it does things differently from other films typically hailed as ultra-gory masterpieces, and I'll talk about why that is in a moment. It is possibly the engine behind the success of this whole film.

I've reviewed a few horror movies with elements of contagion or viruses, released in the past year or two, that I've taken pains to not shoehorn as being "Pandemic Films" - it's impossible to say at this point how movies concerning covid are going to age, considering that we're still in the pandemic, but usually I don't want circumstances that were taking place at the time of a film's release to be inseparable from my overall impression of it, because someone could be watching said movie in 50 years and have no clue what it felt like for me to watch it in 2020. But The Sadness is a pandemic movie. It's inextricable from the current situation we're in. I say "we", but vitally, this movie is from Taiwan; East Asian countries have had a drastically different and unique experience of the pandemic from what I in the West have. The market on covid films here is oversaturated with stuff that has titles like "Flurona Mask Shark Zombies" and usually these films build off of denial of covid and making fun of perceived hysteria rather than the deep fear and uncertainty that The Sadness has as its backbone.

Although I think there's more blood in this than I've seen in any movie in recent memory, the gore is not non-stop. It's restrained to sudden bursts of almost transcendent violence that the characters have to try desperately to avoid; these little islands of annihilation that they bike and run and fire-extinguisher-to-the-skull their way out of. It felt like there was just about a 50/50 balance between these truly impressive feats of human depravity and moments of genuine calm and even real tenderness, and that was why, when things got bloody and violent, it felt just awful. It's crucial that The Sadness gives us times like the first fifteenish minutes, wherein we see how the two main characters care for each other and live a quiet, peaceful life together, or scenes where the female lead goes to fairly exceptional lengths to help rescue a total stranger from a train. These scenes of normalcy show us that there is another state of being than the unhinged violence caused by the film's covid stand-in. And it really does reflect something of what it felt like to just be entering the pandemic: I still could remember what it was like to eat in a restaurant, I could remember being physically close to people, but then I would check the news and see things like Italy getting absolutely decimated in the early days of the pandemic and the contrast between the memory of safety and the new reality in front of me made me feel doomed. The Sadness manages to somehow be both visceral and ominous at the same time. That isn't easy to pull off.

I was also so in love with the practical effects in this. They have a shiny, more-real-than-real quality to them, and again, they're not overused - the infected don't mutate to a point where they don't resemble humans or where they look like the walking dead, instead they acquire a genuinely disturbing uncanny valley quality with big, soulless black eyes and a permanent rictus grin. There is so much blood and so much violence, but it's not constant, and that's why it's great. The film as a whole presents enough depth (and even a slight bit of satire) that it diverges entirely from the "what if covid, but it made people zombies" genre that is rapidly accruing films. The depth comes from the fact that it's heavily implied that the infected are kind of "locked in" to their bodies, that they might be fully aware of the abominable acts they're committing but unable to stop themselves, which is potentially the most horrifying thing I've heard about in any pandemic movie thus far.

I'm also really interested in that cartoon that was playing on TV accompanied by what sounded like a public service announcement from someone in the late stages of infection. If anything about this movie disappointed me at all, it's that that was never fully explored. Because it implied that either someone out there retained enough agency and cognitive ability to animate, edit, compose music for, and broadcast a cartoon depicting the horrible depravity they wanted to inflict on society due to the virus' effect on them, or it implied that someone out there had knowledge enough of what was coming that they had that cartoon ready to go before the pandemic even began. The origin of the virus isn't really important to the plot of the film, but what the cartoon implies about it is something I was left wondering about.

To me, there's a perfect level of violence that this movie hits and goes no further. Some of it feels deeply personal and that's why it's so unsettling. The female character is stalked for a good portion of the film by a guy who wouldn't leave her alone on a train, and it just felt so real, so relatable to have this guy following you who you can't get rid of and you don't know what he's going to do to you. That coupling of the real - both on a personal level and in the broader sense of this being about a pandemic and made during an actual pandemic - with the speculative is why this is such a good horror movie. I'm very glad to finally see a new release that didn't let me down, and it blows my mind that this is a debut film for Robert Jabbaz.