The Sadness (2021)

directed by Robert Jabbaz

Taiwan

99 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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(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.

Incantation (2022)

directed by Kevin Ko

Taiwan

111 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I was looking forward to this one for a while based on the strength of the reactions to it that I'd been seeing. I've been having trouble motivating myself to watch new films lately, so to see one that not only didn't disappoint but well exceeded my expectations was very satisfying. There are ways in which this movie resembles a lot of things I've seen before, but the end product that it delivers is on the whole much different from all other things that share similar themes.

Incantation opens with some breakage of the third wall as the main character introduces her situation - or what she wants us to believe her situation is - on camera. The point she's trying to make is that human will can, to some degree, literally influence the material world; the way you think you see things or want to see things can alter the way they actually look. As an example she puts up on screen two optical illusions similar to the very popular "rotating ballerina" one where, depending on how you perceive it, a spinning wheel can either be going left or right, or a train can either be oncoming or leaving. I found this a very interesting thing to include in a fictional narrative. We're used to films immediately reaching for special effects to show us breaks in reality, so the fact that this film utilizes the actual brain of the viewer in all of its uncanniness really adds a layer of discomfort. It would have been easy to doctor some footage to make us believe we were influencing the onscreen images with our minds, but that doesn't happen. Instead, we see the real thing.

This is at least partially supposed to be about a cursed video, which is mostly why I wanted to watch it at all, since horror movies about cursed videos are possibly my favorite kind of horror movies. But this doesn't end up really being one of the central points of the film as a whole - yes, there is a video and there is a curse, but the fact that the curse is captured on video is secondary to what everything is about. I have few criticisms of this movie, but this is one slight one; it feels like the concept of the video being able to physically affect people is brought up early and then very quickly dropped. We see police officers commit suicide after being shown it, and we see people getting into a car crash after presumably seeing it, but the viral nature of the footage is never emphasized beyond that. I did not mind this too much, because the small, intimate scale of the cast who are involved in the story made it a better film, but I felt like the suicides and other related deaths had me geared up for this to pan out differently than it did.

The reason why I said that this was not an unfamiliar premise to me is because I've seen a lot of horror movies coming from southeast Asia (and some really terrible ones from America and the like) where the source of horror is the ostensibly Buddhist practices of some small, backwater community. I'm not usually a fan of these kinds of things because it feels like at heart all they're saying is that smaller, often syncretic religions practiced in rural areas are frightening and not to be trusted, in contrast with organized religion, which is supposedly fine. But the visual language Incantation uses to present its concept - though said concept may basically be the same "remote village with a freaky patron god" thing - is far different from the trite, sometimes elitist views I've gotten used to.

This movie is really dedicated to making the shrines, relics, and general locale look authentic and believable as a part of Buddhism. Very, very little here feels like it's deliberately scary. No upside-down crosses (or equivalent) or twigs Blair Witched together into idols that everyone bows to. The lushness and vibrant color of Buddhist reliquaries and murals are depicted here in full glory, and aside from the final reveal in the statue room it doesn't look like anything you wouldn't actually see in a mural depicting scenes from Buddhist literature. I think that this plays into what I feel is the stance from which the film approaches religion. In showing us imagery that is not altered to be more frightening than it would be in real life, Incantation is not creating a sect of evil worshippers but instead making the point that the way a devotee interprets their religion changes its entire meaning. And at one point the main character does attempt to consult the "good" side of Buddhism as a desperate attempt to save herself and her daughter, but the things the master says she has to go through for a shot at redemption are so difficult that the difference between "normal" worship and the warped practices of the cursed village seem very similar.

There is a question I kept coming up with that can also extend beyond this and into other religious horror films as well: Is it more frightening to be worshipping the wrong thing, or to not be worshipping the right thing hard enough? To that end, in this film, where did the instructions for how to pray, how to devote, how to decorate the shrines and set up the icons come from? Were they cobbled together by the people in an attempt to pacify and please a deity they're all afraid of, or were they handed down from some external force with the promise of prosperity attached? Were the people promised salvation and blessings if they just continued to keep the faith, at any cost? Or are they searching for those blessings themselves? The line between what we would consider "acceptable" religion and something dark and sinister is thin and often permeable. That is the fear at the heart of Incantation - that all worship has the potential to go bad, not just worship of a specific and identifiably evil deity.

The one other issue I had with this that didn't occur to me until I was trying to fall asleep afterwards is that the monk in Yunnan who the main character's friend seeks out to translate the sutras could have essentially saved everyone's life but instead is just used as this monk ex machina, serving only to explain, not to influence. I guess that's pretty monkish of him, but this one guy or his younger interpreter could have raised more of a fuss upon being approached by an exhausted-looking man from very far away who asks him to translate a bunch of evil-sounding words and maybe not as many people would have died.

Aside from that, though, and a little disappointment that they went full-frontal in revealing the statue at the end, it's pretty rare for me to have so few actual complaints about a film. The human side of things felt almost uncomfortably real, and instead of detracting from the scary bits, I was compelled by the underlying story about a struggling single mother trying her damnedest to recover from what she was wrapped up in so that she could be the best parent for her daughter, who she clearly loved. Even the inclusion of the daughter's carer from the foster home she was brought to after the state took her and his deep, genuine love for her felt real. This is a movie that's equal on all sides, establishing characters who you care about and a terrifying horror story. The visual scares are equally as disconcerting as your growing awareness that everybody you're watching, no matter how much you want them to pull through, is doomed. There's something really interesting and fresh here, and I hope that this director will continue to come out with horror films that feel this original instead of recycling tropes.