In this era of horror, how exactly do you make something stand out in all the worst ways possible?
Because we’re long-past the era of the video nasty, when a movie deemed particularly grotesque or morally objectionable would get the Obscene Publications Act stamp of non-approval to prove their mettle, and even more recently, releases like The Human Centipede were few and far between enough in the mainstream to attract real attention and derision. But, in this era of horror, that’s far harder to pull off – as horror moves further and further into the mainstream, so does the nasty stuff that comes with it, and it’s much more difficult, as a result, to create a movie that turns the proverbial stomach of the horror-watching public. I mean, with something as violent as Hereditary firmly in the mainstream, where do you begin in making a modern video nasty?
Well, Rob Jabbaz, in 2021, took a big swing in the nastiness stakes with The Sadness. Not that, if you’ve been anywhere near the horror movie scene in the last five years since its release, you would need to be told that – heavily inspired by the legendarily horrible Crossed comic series from Garth Ennis (an adaptation of which currently boasts Jabbaz at the helm), The Sadness is one of those films that was always mentioned with a slight grimace – a gnarly, nasty, exceptionally and inventively violent Taiwanese zombie-adjacent flick about a virus outbreak that causes the population at large to descend into their darkest and most disturbing impulses, that follows a couple, Kat (Regina Lei) and Jim (Berant Zhu), as they try to reunite while the city descends into chaos.
And, look, if we’re talking about sheer stomach-churning, seat-squirming horribleness, The Sadness delivers in spades. If you’re able, go into it as cold as possible – I did, and it hit me the same way the European extremist movies did back when I was a teenager in 2000s, that hand-over-mouth horror at the sheer depravity on display here. Jabbaz does not hold back in any sense of the word, the sets drenched in blood at every opportunity, the acts of violence spanning sexual, physical, and emotional; it’s a horror in the truest sense of the word, a symphony of the worst shit you can imagine delivered with gleeful execution that balances leaving-it-to-the-imagination restraint with, you know, someone getting barbed wire smashed into their bollocks repeatedly.
And so, if that’s all you’re coming to The Sadness for, you’re unlikely to be disappointed. But I think what has elevated it to such a modern classic in the horror genre is what happens outside of that nastiness. There’s a texture to the storytelling here, giving us plenty of breathers between the horror to really let it sink in, the dread building as we wait for the next big swing to arrive. The violence alone is more than enough to render The Sadness appropriately disturbing, but Jabbaz delves a little deeper, giving us legitimate villains amongst the infected; a businessman (Tzu-Chiang Wang) who harasses Kat on a subway prior to the outbreak turns into a formidable and genuinely terrifying antagonist as he stalks Kat throughout the movie, his entitlement to her attention turning into something far more malicious and dangerous. The backdrop against which the outbreak thrives draws heavily from the reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic, drawing on political hand-wringing and cynicism to ground the story in something distinctly real. The third act takes place mostly in a small, sealed maternity ward with two uninfected humans, and yet, it’s amongst the tensest scenes in the movie, as characters parse out each other’s motivations and the risk they are putting themselves at being alone together.
The Sadness delivers on the gruesome and the gory just as well as its reputations suggests – but beyond that, it’s a tight, compelling, and distinctly unsettling piece of horror that delves into the human as well as the outright hideous. If you’ve endured the movie, I would love to hear what you think of it, so please let me know in the comments below (and keep the ball-smashing to a minimum, if at all possible).
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Netflix)
No But Listen 