I Would Like to See It: The Sadness (Patreon)

Separated by a security gate, two young lovers sit slumped at the end of a hall splattered with dripping gore. The man gives a heartfelt speech about his long quest to return to the woman across a city overrun by people virally transformed into murderous sadists, then slumps against the gate and concludes by sighing he knew he needed to be with her, specifically so that he could cut her tits off. The Sadness, Rob Jabbaz’s debut directorial feature, is larded with such moments of deliberate, intimate meanness. It plays as something between Troma-esque exploitation and unhinged romance, and if by the end the splatters and chunkings are worn a little thin, there’s still plenty to enjoy in its robust practical effects and fun spin on the phenomenon of the zombie pandemic. Jim (Berant Zhu) and his girlfriend Kat (Regina Lei) are enjoyable leads, and with the support of the unstoppably butthurt Businessman (Tzu-Chiang Wang) as their chief antagonist, the film’s legs are strong enough to carry it through even its most mindless shock-jock moments.

More often than not, though, that mean-spirited shock-jockery delivers its thrill and gets out of the viewer’s hair before overstaying its welcome. Garden shears snipping off fingers. A gang of hooligans bum-rushing a battered man crotch-first into a pole wrapped in barbed wire. A waiter smacked across the face with a fryer full of boiling oil, his skin sloughing off in blistered rags. There’s a less effective and less interesting sequence involving a CGI baby infected with the virus, a moment which strays too far into flat, uncanny evil, but the point the larger scene is driving at with regard to hyper-logical men pursuing survival at any cost and using their own facts-driven realpolitik as a cover for their venal cowardice is interesting. Much of Jabbaz’s film, in fact, is concerned with small and large expressions of misogyny, from the Businessman’s simultaneously intrusive and sniveling profession of horniness to Kat to the MRT worker (Lue-Keng Huang) whose phone background is some sort of softcore bondage hentai.

The film seems to posit the explosion of viral sadism as a symbolic outgrowth of pre-existing tensions, the most significant of which is the violence women face at the hands of men. Much of the feminine violence we see in the film is driven by revenge for these transgressions. Ultimately, though, it’s not The Sadness’s chief concern to build any kind of coherent metaphor. What matters is a writhing tangle of black-eyed infected fucking in a slick of blood. An ax-wielding nebbish biting a muscular good samaritan’s nose and lip off and then splitting his head open like a melon. A man telling his girlfriend, with loving tenderness, that he wants to hold her close and slice her tits off like lunch meat. “It feels great,” he says of his new life as one of the infected, blessed with the gift to savor and delight in all the world’s atrocities. “It feels so fucking good.” Amen.