Dead Talents Society (2024)
Taiwan has produced some genuinely singular genre cinema over the past two decades, from the quiet devastation of Edward Yang's realism to the visceral unease of films like The Sadness (2021), which I found about as punishing as horror gets. Dead Talents Society, arriving in 2024 and distributed internationally through Sony Pictures International Productions alongside local studio Activator Marketing Company, sits at a rather different point on that spectrum. It is a horror-comedy from director John Hsu, running at a brisk 110 minutes, and it carries a tagline that might be the driest in recent memory: "Do you know what the best thing about being dead is?" The film's premise places its ghost characters in a kind of afterlife industry, one that demands they continually haunt the living or risk fading out of existence entirely. It is, on paper, a ghost story. In practice, as you will gather, it is rather more than that.
Hsu made his feature debut with Detention (2019), a psychological horror rooted in Taiwan's White Terror period that earned considerable festival attention and demonstrated an appetite for genre filmmaking with real thematic weight behind it. Here he co-writes with Tsai Kun-lin, and the pair build their story around a system of supernatural bureaucracy that borrows freely from showbusiness satire. The parallel with social media metrics, follower counts, and the terror of irrelevance is worn lightly enough that it never feels like a lecture, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. For a companion piece on Taiwanese cinema working in a more sombre register, see also Yi Yi (2000), Edward Yang's masterwork of everyday life that feels about as far from this film's comic register as it is possible to get, and yet shares something of the same preoccupation with what we leave behind.
The principal cast is led by Chen Bolin, a performer with considerable range across Taiwanese and mainland Chinese productions, who plays the passionate agent figure at the centre of the afterlife machinery. Sandrine Pinna, a French-Taiwanese actress who has built a strong following on both sides of that cultural divide, brings a particular physicality and timing to her role. Gingle Wang and Eleven Yao round out the ensemble, while Bai Jing-yi also appears in a supporting capacity. It is a cast well suited to material that requires performers to hold comedy and genuine feeling in the same moment without either curding the other. On the craft side, cinematographer Chou Yi-hsien lights the underworld sequences with a colour palette that leans into the heightened and slightly garish, all washed-out pinks and institutional greens that give the afterlife the feel of a mildly disreputable talent agency. Composer Lu Lu-ming's score threads between the comic and the melancholic without settling too long in either register, and editor Shieh Meng-ju keeps the pacing tight enough that the film's satirical conceits land before they overstay their welcome. Horror comedies are a notoriously difficult tonal balance, as I found when I wrote about Pontypool (2008), a film that wrestles with genre expectation in a very different way but shares a certain pleasure in wrong-footing its audience.
Dead Talents Society turns up filed under horror, and that is almost a practical joke, because what John Hsu has actually made is a comedy, and a wickedly sharp one at that.
I came to it blind, lured by its place on a top horror list and half-expecting a comedy-horror at most, only to find barely a scare worth the name in it, despite all the ghosts, the afterlife and the haunting. What it offers instead is satire, and very good satire.
The premise is the sort of thing I had never once considered, and it is a beauty. In the afterlife, ghosts have to keep frightening the living in order to stay famous, and any who fail at it simply fade into obscurity and wink out altogether. From that single idea Hsu builds a sharp commentary on social media, fad culture and the modern terror of being forgotten, the whole anxiety of relevance dressed up as a ghost story. It should not hang together as neatly as it does, and yet it works beautifully.
What lifts it above a clever conceit is that it is very funny, laugh-out-loud in places, while still landing its emotion and a few harder-hitting moments when it matters.
The cast are mostly excellent, Chen Bolin, Gingle Wang and Sandrine Pinna especially, all of them selling the silliness and the feeling in equal measure. My one complaint is Bai Jing-Yi, whose scenes I found more distracting and grating than anything the film seems to intend.
That aside, this is a smart and unexpectedly moving surprise. Four stars, and I will happily point people toward it precisely because the horror label will have put them off.
Dead Talents Society is the kind of film that suffers slightly from its own marketing, filed under a genre label that will deter precisely the audience most likely to enjoy it. What Hsu and Tsai have made is a sharp, warm, occasionally bruising comedy about ambition, obsolescence, and the particular anxiety of mattering to people. It arrives in a moment when that anxiety feels as culturally alive as it has ever been, which gives the film an odd, nagging resonance beyond the jokes. For anyone with an interest in what contemporary Taiwanese cinema is doing at its more playful end, and who has perhaps been put off by that horror classification, the message is simple enough: ignore the label and watch the film. The best thing about being dead, it turns out, is that there is still everything to play for.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-09-12
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Dead Talents Society (2024) on YouTube
Where to watch
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