This article was originally written in Mandarin and published on FUNSCREEN.
For the full article, please refer to: https://funscreen.tfai.org.tw/article/9098
Canadian director Rob Jabbaz originally worked in digital art, advertising, and animation production. He directed his first feature film The Sadness (2021) in Taiwan, applying his rich knowledge of monsters and deformation to produce a zombie/splatter film that is rather spicy by Taiwanese standards. The zombies are characterized as “soft” rather than walking corpses with stiff physique, shattered intelligence, and poor coordination. They more closely resemble humans infected with a virus that impacts emotions and cognitive faculties, causing intensified desire for abuse (whether to abuse or be abused)—the still look human, yet they demonstrate the extremely violent side of humanity. Such immediate violence makes sexual violence on par with general violence in the film.
The Sadness opens with a couple getting ready to leave for work when everyday scenes—scooter riders, breakfast shops, and the subway—become different as weird-looking people show up with bizarre behavior. An unknown infectious disease is rapidly spreading across Taiwan. Like Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1979), it has evolving agile zombies and excessive usage of blood spraying everywhere; like George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), it mocks social phenomena. However, having born amid the COVID-19 pandemic, what fascinates me even more about The Sadness is its morphed “human sense” and “Taiwanese feeling,” deeming it almost a hillbilly horror film.
The connotation may have come from the acoustics of the breakfast shop’s exaggerated sizzling noise when frying turnip cakes (tasty traditional Taiwanese breakfast turns into an omen just before slaughtering happens) or from its reference to a past random killing spree in Taipei’s subway. The film pokes fun at culture codes but asserts an old-fashioned ideology of institution like that of Night of the Living Dead, which incidentally echoes voices of questioning doubt whether government management is easy under a pandemic era. These maddened “Taiwanese people” exhibit a kind of aggressiveness that is passionately populist, asks for no logic but only creativity (in attacking others). In this sense, the “Taiwanese feeling” in The Sadness directs at absurdity of a larger scale compared to Get the Hell Out (2020), another satirical zombie film focused on Taiwanese politics.
Meanwhile, this can also be confirmed by the film’s choise of zombie-infecting viruses character setting of zombies/viruses having a “human sense”—which is practically a demonstration of “humanity.” The virus has versatile transmission channels (through blood, fecal-oral route, or even respiratory droplets), high basic reproduction number (R0), high infection rate, and rapid onset—an apocalyptic ambience of “everyone being hopeless” turns into the belief that “infecting others/being infected” are just as bad. On top of that, disease survivors demand violent confrontation or develop passionate anger while the rest face the paradox of “I am either infected or on my way to confronting the virus and getting infected along the way.” In the eyes of an alienated observer, there really is not much difference between the two sides of “Taiwanese” who are infected/may infect others.
In the film, common signs of infection included demonic (or childish) darkened eyes, crying, and sweating, but more interestingly, the infected exhibit “aggressiveness”—enhanced body strength, explosive power, and pain tolerance. Because they execute clear targets and act decisively, they even look “more creative and intelligent”—the only thing is, they lack judgment of risk avoidance and might die of overextending. What they give off is a kind of “toxic masculinity” that just about parallels androgens and adrenaline.
The two crucial male characters in the film (actor Berant Zhu depicts sadness from being the submissive partner in a romantic relationship; Tzu-Chiang Wang portrays a middle-aged man going into shame rage after being rejected) solidify the theory of “toxic masculinity” infection—from its physiological parallel to choosing “Wailing Sadness” (original title, pronounced kao-bay in Mandarin), which is a homophone of the vulgar, wayward local slang “grumbling/whining” (also pronounced kao-bay), to set up its metaphor for masculinist swearing culture (anger) versus men’s “truth in wine” (sadness).
Who can men confide in? The middle-aged man is looked down on by the beauty and youth of his affection, and the boyfriend striving to care for his girlfriend and consolidate self-recognition has run into frustration as well… The “wailing sadness” inside, like “loneliness,” lacks a significant facial expression on the exterior, neither is it a monotonous emotional state—and yet this hard-to-read complexity has been “liberated” thanks to the damaged “infection” mechanism. The zombies shed droplets of “crocodile tears,” kind of like the significance of “last words” in a social setting because they’ll soon be taken over by another zombified physiological system. The chaos or contrast of these tears remind me of the pathological laughs in Joker (2019)—the moment they shift from being helpless to congruent. It goes beyond the “wailing sadness” and loneliness of the male—people who get avoided for their unsightly appearance or signs of infection, the atmosphere of people detesting contact and closeness to avoid infection, all these fit the context of our pandemic era.
After the middle-aged man is shamed into rage, he decides to thrust into any hole in sight (even eye sockets). The underconfident Adonis flips from his pseudo-caretaker role into an aggressive love-professor in the style of Marquis de Sade— “(I have journeyed through fire and ice) Just so I can find you; after I find you…I will cut off your breasts and mutilate your face.” A person’s deepest desires turn into a raw, superficial transgression; the absurdity in The Sadness is even George Bataille-esque.
Some might attribute the “source of evil” to misogyny (commonly seen in horror movies), yet I find it more like a reversal of Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003). The female protagonist of In the Cut represents the perspective of being inescapably “morphed into” female groups by society, followed by using sophisticated distortion to denounce men-inflicted harm towards women. In The Sadness, there’s a serial killer of “men slashing throats of women” creeping around while the female protagonist uses the expression “he killed her” to describe the ending of a romance; moreover, she acts like a capricious detective, conjuring prophecies and signs based on daily observations, making arbitrary connection as to who the killer is. It shouts as accusing the “penetration sex position” to have facilitated inevitable suffering from gender hierarchy—which is a poetic dead end for believing that “heterosexuality suggests damage.” By comparison, Jane Campion’s clever parallel of female aphasia and “why should ‘reason’ be” coincidentally contrasts Rob Jabbaz’s style in The Sadness in the choice of blunt, violent men hacking as he “kills his bloody way out.”
HAN TIEN 
This article was originally written in Mandarin and published on FUNSCREEN.
For the full article, please refer to: https://funscreen.tfai.org.tw/article/9098
Canadian director Rob Jabbaz originally worked in digital art, advertising, and animation production. He directed his first feature film The Sadness (2021) in Taiwan, applying his rich knowledge of monsters and deformation to produce a zombie/splatter film that is rather spicy by Taiwanese standards. The zombies are characterized as “soft” rather than walking corpses with stiff physique, shattered intelligence, and poor coordination. They more closely resemble humans infected with a virus that impacts emotions and cognitive faculties, causing intensified desire for abuse (whether to abuse or be abused)—the still look human, yet they demonstrate the extremely violent side of humanity. Such immediate violence makes sexual violence on par with general violence in the film.
The Sadness opens with a couple getting ready to leave for work when everyday scenes—scooter riders, breakfast shops, and the subway—become different as weird-looking people show up with bizarre behavior. An unknown infectious disease is rapidly spreading across Taiwan. Like Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1979), it has evolving agile zombies and excessive usage of blood spraying everywhere; like George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), it mocks social phenomena. However, having born amid the COVID-19 pandemic, what fascinates me even more about The Sadness is its morphed “human sense” and “Taiwanese feeling,” deeming it almost a hillbilly horror film.
The connotation may have come from the acoustics of the breakfast shop’s exaggerated sizzling noise when frying turnip cakes (tasty traditional Taiwanese breakfast turns into an omen just before slaughtering happens) or from its reference to a past random killing spree in Taipei’s subway. The film pokes fun at culture codes but asserts an old-fashioned ideology of institution like that of Night of the Living Dead, which incidentally echoes voices of questioning doubt whether government management is easy under a pandemic era. These maddened “Taiwanese people” exhibit a kind of aggressiveness that is passionately populist, asks for no logic but only creativity (in attacking others). In this sense, the “Taiwanese feeling” in The Sadness directs at absurdity of a larger scale compared to Get the Hell Out (2020), another satirical zombie film focused on Taiwanese politics.
Meanwhile, this can also be confirmed by the film’s choise of zombie-infecting viruses character setting of zombies/viruses having a “human sense”—which is practically a demonstration of “humanity.” The virus has versatile transmission channels (through blood, fecal-oral route, or even respiratory droplets), high basic reproduction number (R0), high infection rate, and rapid onset—an apocalyptic ambience of “everyone being hopeless” turns into the belief that “infecting others/being infected” are just as bad. On top of that, disease survivors demand violent confrontation or develop passionate anger while the rest face the paradox of “I am either infected or on my way to confronting the virus and getting infected along the way.” In the eyes of an alienated observer, there really is not much difference between the two sides of “Taiwanese” who are infected/may infect others.
In the film, common signs of infection included demonic (or childish) darkened eyes, crying, and sweating, but more interestingly, the infected exhibit “aggressiveness”—enhanced body strength, explosive power, and pain tolerance. Because they execute clear targets and act decisively, they even look “more creative and intelligent”—the only thing is, they lack judgment of risk avoidance and might die of overextending. What they give off is a kind of “toxic masculinity” that just about parallels androgens and adrenaline.
The two crucial male characters in the film (actor Berant Zhu depicts sadness from being the submissive partner in a romantic relationship; Tzu-Chiang Wang portrays a middle-aged man going into shame rage after being rejected) solidify the theory of “toxic masculinity” infection—from its physiological parallel to choosing “Wailing Sadness” (original title, pronounced kao-bay in Mandarin), which is a homophone of the vulgar, wayward local slang “grumbling/whining” (also pronounced kao-bay), to set up its metaphor for masculinist swearing culture (anger) versus men’s “truth in wine” (sadness).
Who can men confide in? The middle-aged man is looked down on by the beauty and youth of his affection, and the boyfriend striving to care for his girlfriend and consolidate self-recognition has run into frustration as well… The “wailing sadness” inside, like “loneliness,” lacks a significant facial expression on the exterior, neither is it a monotonous emotional state—and yet this hard-to-read complexity has been “liberated” thanks to the damaged “infection” mechanism. The zombies shed droplets of “crocodile tears,” kind of like the significance of “last words” in a social setting because they’ll soon be taken over by another zombified physiological system. The chaos or contrast of these tears remind me of the pathological laughs in Joker (2019)—the moment they shift from being helpless to congruent. It goes beyond the “wailing sadness” and loneliness of the male—people who get avoided for their unsightly appearance or signs of infection, the atmosphere of people detesting contact and closeness to avoid infection, all these fit the context of our pandemic era.
After the middle-aged man is shamed into rage, he decides to thrust into any hole in sight (even eye sockets). The underconfident Adonis flips from his pseudo-caretaker role into an aggressive love-professor in the style of Marquis de Sade— “(I have journeyed through fire and ice) Just so I can find you; after I find you…I will cut off your breasts and mutilate your face.” A person’s deepest desires turn into a raw, superficial transgression; the absurdity in The Sadness is even George Bataille-esque.
Some might attribute the “source of evil” to misogyny (commonly seen in horror movies), yet I find it more like a reversal of Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003). The female protagonist of In the Cut represents the perspective of being inescapably “morphed into” female groups by society, followed by using sophisticated distortion to denounce men-inflicted harm towards women. In The Sadness, there’s a serial killer of “men slashing throats of women” creeping around while the female protagonist uses the expression “he killed her” to describe the ending of a romance; moreover, she acts like a capricious detective, conjuring prophecies and signs based on daily observations, making arbitrary connection as to who the killer is. It shouts as accusing the “penetration sex position” to have facilitated inevitable suffering from gender hierarchy—which is a poetic dead end for believing that “heterosexuality suggests damage.” By comparison, Jane Campion’s clever parallel of female aphasia and “why should ‘reason’ be” coincidentally contrasts Rob Jabbaz’s style in The Sadness in the choice of blunt, violent men hacking as he “kills his bloody way out.”
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