The Sadness
Shudder's "The Sadness" is an assured, exhausting and unpleasant feature debut for writer/director Rob Jabbaz.
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You likely already know if you’re the sort of person who can withstand watching a man gouge out a woman’s eyeball with the tip of his umbrella only to invade her empty ocular cavity. This depravity and more abound in the “The Sadness” (now streaming on Shudder), the feature debut of Canadian filmmaker Rob Jabbaz.
We’re in Taipei, Taiwan. Young couple Jim (Berant Zhu) and Kat (Regina Lei) awake from their slumber on a morning that seems none too dissimilar from any other. She’s getting ready for work. They talk about taking a vacation the following week. He forgot about a professional commitment that threatens to derail their trip. She’s annoyed. They briefly visit with their neighbor Mr. Lin (Ralf Yen-Hsiang Chiu), who offers them some Thai basil he grew on his balcony. The TV’s on in the background – pundits pontificate about how the Alvin virus is a hoax. They ride to the train station aboard his motor scooter to facilitate her commute. She gets dropped off and boards her train. He goes to get a coffee … then, all hell breaks loose.
Turns out the “experts” don’t have the foggiest idea of what they’re talking about and those infected with the Alvin virus are rapidly being transformed into black-eyed, ravenous, rape-y reprobates who are ready to run roughshod over anyone who’s unfortunate enough to cross their path. Jim and Kat attempt to reunite with one another while aiding those in need of assistance. (Zhu and Lei are appealing, attractive leads and the kindness of their characters leaves you rooting for them against insurmountable odds.) Jim stops a gang of youths from continuing to ram a man genitals-first into a pole wrapped with barbed wire only to have the man chastise him as he was close to climax. Kat assists Molly (Ying-Ru Chen) in escaping from a businessman (a truly unhinged Tzu-Chiang Wang) who spends the flick’s remainder striving to sexually assault them.
“The Sadness” is an assured debut for writer/director Jabbaz. The movie has a lot to say about all sorts of things – the politicization of a pandemic, our overreliance on cell phones, how COVID has likely made us all crappier to each other, the proliferation of toxic masculinity. It touches upon all of these topics, but doesn’t have the time to delve into any of them too deeply as it’s more concerned with blood-letting (there’s a literal blood orgy in this beast) and one-upping the previous putridity. A prolonged sequence aboard Kat’s train is a disgusting doozy. The special makeup effects by the team at IF SFX Art Maker are presented in 5G as they’re gnarly, gooey, gory, grody and gross.
“The Sadness” calls to mind “The Raid” pictures by way of “A Serbian Film” (a movie I admittedly haven’t seen, but have heard and read plenty about – I don’t need that shit in my life!) all filtered through either George A. Romero or Breck Eisner’s “The Crazies.” It also explicitly references David Cronenberg’s “Scanners” and Gaspar Noé’s “Irreversible.” I found it to be an exhausting and unpleasant (the C-word is thrown about with such frequency it felt like a late 1980s/early 1990s Andrew Dice Clay standup set) experience … albeit a skillfully-crafted one. It’s a movie I endured far more than I enjoyed. I wanted to have a drink and take a shower afterwards, but alas I was running late to work.