It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022.
Here there be spoilers.
On the surface, The Sadness seems to be another in a long line of plague/zombie films. We open on two lovers, a clueless doofus and his pretty, patient girlfriend. Background news reports about a strange virus making the rounds. The lovers separate to go about their days, only to have a horrible outbreak spread across the city/world, forcing them to try to survive long enough to reunite. The Sadness, however, takes this barebones plot and, drawing inspiration from the 2008 Garth Ennis written comic, Crossed, instead of zombies we get something much, much worse.
Writer/Director Rob Jabbaz, in his feature film debut, has done something special. The Sadness is one of the most extreme, disturbing films to reach a mainstream audience in memory. Instead of giving us the mindless hordes, we go beyond even the rage monsters of 28 Days Later, as the infected here aren’t just rabid, they’re malicious. A mutation in a Covid-like flu virus impacts the parts of the brain that govern sex and aggression, completely unlocking the impulses to do the worst things imaginable.
And to enjoy doing them. Consciously.
Cue torture, rape, murder, necrophilia, and just about any other horrible thing one might want a trigger warning for.
The film is set in Taipei, Taiwan, and our doomed lovers Jim (Berant Zhu) and Kat (Regina Lei) are fairly blank slates with just enough attention given to characterization to make them likeable. But The Sadness isn’t about character. It’s about modern society in an upsettingly universal way. Cultural differences don’t really seem to be a thing here, and every bit of social criticism, from undercurrents of misogyny to political incompetence to the breakdown of confidence in institutions, could play out just as perfectly in the U.S. as it does in Taiwan.
It’s like a Trump rally taking place at Woodstock ’99.
Broken into short vignettes as Jim tries to get across the city to find Kat – what he intends to do if he finds her isn’t clear – we get scene after scene of bloody, bloody, bloody violence by black-eyed people who can’t stop grinning wildly. And crying. It seems that somewhere inside the infected there may still be some sort of conscience weeping, watching the Id take over, fighting and fucking everything in sight.
Meanwhile Kat is on the run from a character simply called The Businessman (Tzu-Chiang Wang), who is the manifestation of every horror story women tell about interacting with entitled, toxic men. He’s the embodiment of those “nice” guys girls don’t pay attention to, the “nice” ones who immediately start calling women whores and sluts or worse, when their advances are rejected.
And that’s before he’s infected.
One of the most terrifying aspects of The Sadness is the implication that the infected are just society unleashed from restraint and that everybody is horrible once the veneer of civilization is removed. Hell, people in this film are shitty to each other without being infected, as soon as things start to go bad. It’s worse than the implications of something like The Walking Dead, where good people do bad things to survive. In the world Jabbaz has created, there are only bad people doing bad things. Even if you try to be a good person, you’re fucked by a world that actively tries to destroy you.
In The Sadness, nobody is safe, nobody is innocent. There is no hope. It’s the most bleakly nihilistic horror film I’ve seen in ages. You’d almost believe it was French.