Ever since George Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead turned a monster film into a meditation on institutional racism, zombie films are one of the horror genre’s most effective vehicles for sociological observation: Dawn of the Dead takes consumer culture while Shaun of the Dead parodies the soul-destroying nature of grunt work and everyday life. But that doesn’t mean every zombie movie has to address big themes about the state of humanity. With Sadness, Shudder’s new Taiwanese zombie film, newly minted Canadian writer-director Rob Jabbaz definitely wants to join the ranks of these classics. But he doesn’t find the right level of finesse and shamelessness to marry his grotesque blood and violence, given the moral lessons he seems bound to learn.
Sadnessloosely inspired by Garth Ennis’ crossed Comic series follows a young couple in Taiwan, Jim (Berant Zhu) and Kat (Regina Lei). Jim drops Kat off at work just hours before a zombie-like outburst that requires them to search for each other in the chaos. These infected are not traditional zombies. Jabbaz is replaced by something more gruesome: his highly contagious virus, akin to rabies, drives victims to act out their most sadistic impulses. They have no shame and no power to stop themselves – and they give in to their terrible urges with huge, unshakeable grins on their faces.
[Ed. note: The rest of this review includes brief descriptions of some particularly grotesque acts of physical and sexual violence.]
That’s a good premise, but Jabbaz is too focused on finding a profound metaphor that doesn’t exist instead of just using the setup as an excuse for some of the most baseless and ridiculous gores in recent memory.
In his script, Jabbaz tries to say something important on a number of subjects. At the beginning of the film, before the chaos begins, a newscast includes a scientist complaining about all the people who believe the pandemic in the universe is a hoax and that no one believes scientists anymore. When Kat smacks an infected character on the head – a man who spent the entire film raping her – he exclaims that it makes her just like him, seemingly implying that almost everyone craves the opportunity engage in extreme violence. The movie even doubles down on this when an uninfected character mentions with his dying breath how good it feels to kill babies.
Jabbaz also spends part of the pre-infection period with Kat while being harassed on her way home, and briefly explores the horror of women being approached and threatened on a day-to-day basis. Her molester later becomes infected and pursues her across town. But research into normal gender-based violence is quickly halted, and minutes later people are being raped on the street by infected people grinning and waving at passers-by.
It’s completely unclear what Jabbaz wants to convey to viewers of all of this. Is the news show’s allusions to real pandemic responses meant to provide some insight into the infection here? Does it mean that humanity is only restrained by the social order, or is the idea that “everyone secretly wants to commit atrocities” just old-fashioned horror-movie cynicism? Whatever the answer, Jabbaz raises questions and then drops them altogether, making the film feel more hollow than if it never addressed them at all.
It’s a disappointment that the film’s messaging side falters, because Sadness is at its best when it’s unashamedly violent. When the virus first emerges, Jim is at a restaurant getting coffee when an infected person walks in and attacks someone, killing them and spreading the infection to everyone nearby. What starts as a mundane coffee order suddenly turns into a dizzying action scene and chase as people start tearing each other apart, Jim sprints away and several infected follow him from back alleys to busy streets. Immediately afterwards, a train car engages in a melee violence that ends with the entire train car being soaked in gallons and gallons of blood.
Underlying all of these attacks are some outstanding practical effects and prosthetics. Victims are mutilated and torn apart in all sorts of ways, and each death looks unique in its own impressive, sickening way. Jabbaz even uses the fountains of blood squirting from cuts and stabs to give the scenes a forward drive, like he’s creating a red timeline of the fight on the floor and walls.
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Image: shudder
But he’s not content to rest on all that fantastic blood. He spends most of the rest Sadness‘ Runtime set up quasi-vignettes in which his infected – and sometimes uninfected – characters do the worst things imaginable. The specific acts, from ramming a man’s crotch against a barbed-wire-covered pole to a man raping a woman’s empty eye socket, are designed to shock, and they’re certainly horrific. While none of this is inconsistent with the film’s other atrocities, it doesn’t feel consistent with the scenes from the opening. It’s as if Jabbaz were saying, “If you think sexual harassment is bad, just think how much worse it could get.”
A lot of great movies have played fast and loose with the grotesque—and many have been a lot harder to digest than this one. But exploitation horror movies like Wes Craven’s 1977 version The hills have eyes Do this with less shame and more finesse. (Jabbaz has a habit of having his characters remind audiences, in the most literal words, of the atrocities they just committed.) The line between absurdity and effectiveness is delicate when it comes to these kinds of extremes, and Sadness
As strange as it may sound in a movie where a man is force-fed a hand grenade, some of it feels like a shyness issue. Jabbaz stops at every turn to try to justify himself or object before the very worst of his carnage. But he lacks confidence in his own wickedness, as if he feels like turning the violence into a metaphor to make it more acceptable. Gross splatter movies needn’t bother with a thin justification – they can only exist to unsettle the brave few of us who want to, and Sadness‘ tonal dissonances only stand in the way of this goal.
While zombie movies usually work broadly, the kind of extreme exploitation horror Jabbaz works with thrives on the specificity of their circumstances and characters. But with Sadnessthe piling up of bodies becomes so tiring, and the violence so widespread, that it makes any further point moot.
In honor of Jabbaz, he’s set in a troubled genre that’s been devoid of content for the past few years — though in 2021 Wrong move Remake will better serve those looking for something shocking. What’s even more frustrating is that it’s clear that Jabbaz is a talented director. Hidden in pieces and pieces Sadness is really great Train to BusanZombie action film zombie-style, but Jabbaz’s film is so weighed down by its own importance and self-destructive impulses that the action never gets a chance to shine.
Cinema is full of gifted frontiersmen, and provocation cinema has a long and celebrated history dating back to 1916 intolerance and 1929 An Andalusian dog to cannibal holocaust and countless films since then. If you’re going to do something gross, you either have to do it right or very, very wrong, and Sadness can’t handle both. It just fails to acknowledge that not all zombie movies need to have a moral, metaphor, or message.
Sadness will be streaming on Shudder starting May 12th.
