The Sadness (2021)
★★½ — The Sadness (2021)
There's a version of The Sadness that I'd have loved. You can see it in the first act, hovering just beneath the surface, tantalisingly close. A sharp, modern spin on the rage-virus subgenre, rooted not in the supernatural but in the kind of societal collapse that feels uncomfortably plausible. Crowded Taipei streets folding into chaos. Public transit becoming a killing floor. A young couple separated and desperate to find each other amid the carnage. For a while, this film has genuine momentum and genuine dread.
The setup earns its comparisons to 28 Days Later and The Crazies. The cinematography is crisp, the pacing urgent, and there's a creeping sense that the world on screen isn't so far removed from our own. The two leads, Berant Zhu and Regina Lei, are committed and watchable, anchoring the chaos with performances that feel grounded even as everything around them spirals. I was in. I was properly in.
And then the film decides it doesn't want to be that film anymore.
Somewhere around the midpoint, The Sadness abandons tension entirely and doubles down on extreme gore. Not the kind of gore that serves a story, that punctuates dread or forces you to sit with something uncomfortable, but gore as an end in itself. Scene after scene of escalating brutality, piled on until the shock response just stops firing and numbness takes over. The film is going for provocation, and it achieves it, but provocation alone isn't horror. It's just noise.
The scenes involving sexual violence are where the film loses me completely. They're not unsettling in a way that illuminates anything about the characters, the world, or the collapse of civilisation being depicted. They exist to be transgressive. That's the whole point of them, as far as I can tell. And I find that not just unpleasant but lazy. Cruelty dressed up as courage. Extremity mistaken for impact.
What's genuinely frustrating is that there's a compelling idea buried in here about how quickly ordinary people become capable of atrocity, about the thin membrane separating a functioning society from its opposite. The Sadness gestures at that idea and then discards it in favour of the next money shot of viscera. Compare that to something like Incantation (2022), another Taiwanese genre film I've covered on the blog, which uses its horror to say something, to build genuine dread from cultural and psychological specificity. Or even Tiger Stripes, which weaponises body horror in service of a real and urgent point. The Sadness has none of that purpose.
There's horror in the world this film depicts. The premise is fertile ground. But the choices made in how to show it strip away everything that made the first act work. Suspense requires restraint. Dread requires space to breathe. Once the film commits to relentless, unbroken brutality, you stop fearing what comes next because you already know: more of the same.
Zhu and Lei deserve better. They're working hard in a film that's stopped working for them. By the time the credits roll, any emotional investment the opening scenes built has been thoroughly exhausted, worn down not by genuine darkness but by repetitive shock tactics that mistake quantity for intensity.
Two and a half stars. Technically proficient, initially compelling, and a genuine missed opportunity. The bones of a good film are in here. They're just buried under a lot of mess that didn't need to be there.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2026-02-16
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Shudder · Shudder Amazon Channel
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Philo · AMC Plus Apple TV channel · AMC+ Amazon Channel · AMC+ Roku Premium Channel
Rent: Amazon Video · Fandango At Home
Buy: Amazon Video · Fandango At Home
Physical: Amazon US
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More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
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