The Sadness (2021)
★★½ — The Sadness (2021)
Taiwan has carved out a distinctive place in world cinema over the past few decades, producing work that ranges from the meditative family dramas of Edward Yang (whose masterpiece you can read about in Yi Yi) to more recent genre experiments like Tiger Stripes, another Taiwanese production that uses horror as a lens for something more personal and unsettling. The Sadness, released in 2021 and produced by Machi Xcelsior Studios, sits somewhere different on that spectrum. It is a full-throttle horror thriller from Canadian-born filmmaker Rob Jabbaz, making his feature debut here, and it arrives trailing a considerable amount of festival notoriety. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and quickly built a reputation among genre audiences as one of the more extreme horror films to come out of Asia in recent years. Whether that reputation is a recommendation or a warning very much depends on your appetite for punishment.
Jabbaz, working in Taiwan and writing his own screenplay, plants the film firmly in recognisable pandemic territory. A virus is spreading through Taipei, and unlike the slow-burn anxieties of a conventional outbreak thriller, this one tips almost immediately into physical chaos. The infected are not simply sick or disoriented; they become vehicles for violence and depravity, turning crowded public spaces into something altogether more nightmarish. At the centre of it all is a young couple, played by Berant Zhu and Regina Lei, separated by the chaos and trying to find their way back to each other across a city that is coming apart at the seams. Wang Tzu-chiang, Apple Chen, and Lan Wei-hua round out the principal cast in supporting roles. The 100-minute runtime is lean, and the film wastes little time in establishing its intentions. Zhu and Lei are committed and watchable performers, which makes it all the more frustrating that the film asks so little of them beyond physical and emotional endurance. For fans of the broader genre, it is worth having a look at what we made of You Won't Be Alone and Castle Freak, two horror films that take very different approaches to shock and atmosphere, for a sense of the range available in contemporary genre filmmaking.
The Sadness (2021) begins with promise. A slick, modern take on the rage-virus outbreak subgenre, echoing 28 Days Later and The Crazies with its fast-spreading pandemic that turns ordinary citizens into feral, sadistic killers. The early scenes build a convincing sense of dread: crowded Taipei streets descending into chaos, public transit collapsing, and a young couple desperately trying to reunite amid the panic. The cinematography is sharp, the pacing urgent, and the premise (rooted in societal collapse rather than supernatural forces) feels chillingly plausible. But as the film progresses, it abandons tension and psychological horror entirely in favor of extreme, unrelenting gore. What starts as unsettling devolves into shock for shock’s sake, with scenes of graphic violence (particularly sexual violence) that feel not only gratuitous but deeply exploitative. These moments don’t serve the story or deepen the horror; they exist purely to provoke, robbing the film of any emotional or thematic weight. There’s no suspense here, no creeping dread, just brutality piled on brutality until numbness sets in. The talented leads (Berant Zhu and Regina Lei) give committed performances, but they’re trapped in a film that mistakes cruelty for courage. Technically proficient and initially compelling, but ultimately undone by its own excesses. A missed opportunity that confuses extremity with impact. There’s horror in the world it depicts, but none in how it chooses to show it.
That last line of mine says it all, really. There is a version of this film, one that keeps its nerve and trusts its premise, that could have been something genuinely affecting. The early Taipei sequences hint at it. But once the film commits to its escalating cycle of brutality, any interest I had in the characters or the world they were trapped in evaporated pretty quickly. Extreme horror has its place, and I am not someone who shies away from difficult material when it earns its keep, but there is a difference between discomfort that serves the story and cruelty that just fills the running time. For me, The Sadness crosses that line early and keeps going. Technically polished but morally hollow, and that combination is harder to sit with than any amount of gore.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2026-02-16
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Sadness (2021) on YouTube
Where to watch
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