The Sadness is a cocktail of Gareth Evans’ The Raid for the raw and dirty violence. Add a touch of Last Train to Busan for the horrific survivor aspect against the backdrop of a pandemic virus. And push all these cursors even more to the extreme by going to the gory comics Crossed. Here you are with The Sadness. In this Taiwanese film directed by Canadian Rob Jabbaz, the world has been fighting a virus for the past year. Although the symptoms are mild, things are about to get complicated because of a mutation of the virus. While those infected do not become the living dead, they do become violent and totally uninhibited.
The Sadness is all about extreme impulses. This is the beginning of a real massacre in which Kat (Regina Lei, a very beautiful discovery) and her companion, Jim (Berant Zhu), who is trying to find her, will try to survive.
The film The Sadness is basically about few things. A rather simple scenario, with characters that are not of great depth. Even in his direction, Rob Jabbaz does not try to revolutionize the genre. However, his film works perfectly because he knows his limits and does not try to be more intelligent than he is. With simple elements, he embarks us in 1h40 of intense tension where the horror only grows.
Rob Jabbaz is not afraid to go further and further and to really dirty us, to hurt us even. If the first scene in a restaurant may seem shocking, another one will surpass it a few minutes later. Indeed, nobody is spared in The Sadness. Men and women, children or old people. And the attacks are done in many ways. From a simple knife in the jugular to an umbrella stuck in the eye, to cutting with an axe or a surgical saw.
If the murders are totally gratuitous, so are the sexual assaults. All the people the two heroes meet can rape absolutely anything and everything, there is not even a question of sexual attraction or preference. The disgust reaches its climax in the finale with a whole bunch of horrors that one would not dare to imagine, including a bloody and sticky orgy.
What’s the point of seeing massacres? Well, yes. Because The Sadness establishes above all a climate of uneasiness by confronting us with the most terrifying of things: an instantaneous and unreasonable violence, which it often presents off-screen (leaving our imagination to do the rest). There are, moreover, links that are naturally made with our real-life problems. Beyond the pandemic, a sequence in the subway evokes the terrorist knife attacks. As for Kat’s journey, it points more precisely to harassment and the position of women in society.
The director, Rob Jabbaz, knows that he has to go to the essence by plunging us into a form of cruelty. In this way, he offers us a traumatic experience in the same way as Deliverance (1972) or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), while at the same time assuming the side of entertainment with surrealistic spurts of hemoglobin that are most enjoyable. A daring gamble that was met with flying colors. After The Sadness, it will be difficult to find a work of such intensity.
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