Fantasia Festival 2021 Film Review: The Sadness
Rob Jabbaz’s The Sadness paints a bleak, gory portrait of changed times
A cynical, rage-fueled film carried by its no-holds-barred violence, gore, and depravity, Rob Jabbaz’s The Sadness is the most difficult watch of 2021’s Fantasia Festival. Crossing lines and spilling copious amounts of blood, Jabbaz’s feature-length debut strikes at the heart of our depraved, animal nature. For better or worse, The Sadness is like no zombie movie you’ve seen before. Minor spoilers ahead…
Filmmaker Rob Jabbaz dives into the muck and pessimism even before things go pear-shaped in his feature-length debut, The Sadness: A blaring television in Jim’s (Berant Zhu) apartment relays a virologist’s dire warning against politicizing a mysterious new sickness, only for the report to be drowned out by the program’s cavalier host; Jim’s neighbor, speaking across their adjacent balconies, drones on about the virus as a hoax - a conspiracy perpetrated by corporations and the media. For anyone living in the United States, it’s a familiar brand of bleakness and resistance to science and logic from Trump’s America, but as a Canadian artist living in Taiwan, Jabbaz strikes at a sobering truth just for his American audience: It’s not just here.
The Sadness is as straightforward as a horror movie can be: Jim and his girlfriend Kat (Regina Lei) are separated by their humdrum daily routine, but when a relatively ordinary virus mutates and starts transforming the populace into bloodthirsty, savage zombies, the two embark upon their own journeys to reunite. Its plot is efficiently bare, but The Sadness gets a wicked set of teeth from its twist on the typical undead formula; instead of mindless shamblers with a hankering for flesh, Jabbaz’s zombies are depraved, red-eyed lunatics with their mental faculties intact, but completely stripped of restraint and impulse control. Perhaps the most subversive film of Fantasia this year, The Sadness comes with a trigger warning as clear word of caution: It’s a bloodbath full of murder, rape, and gore. Skin is peeled from sinew, eyeballs plucked from sockets, and limbs are severed with reckless abandon.
“Crossing lines and spilling copious amounts of blood, [Rob] Jabbaz’s feature-length debut strikes at the heart of our depraved, animal nature.”
The message behind The Sadness is singular. The line between man and beast is blurred enough, but what if it were erased entirely? What if we all decided to stop pretending we were above animal savagery and our basest id? Most of the narrative is painted with the same, cruel brush - even the uninfected are portrayed as pathetic or irredeemable. A recurring antagonist, known only as “The Businessman,” pesters Kat on the metro, and when he’s rebuffed, he spews the well-tread incel manifesto of a “changed society” all the while ignoring and disrespecting personal boundaries, fueled by his perceived entitlement to female companionship. And when the virus finally takes hold of him? He becomes much more terrifying than he already is. Even those placed within the narrative to help are conveyed in a sad, unflattering light; when Kat asks to borrow a cell phone from a security guard, she has to swipe through screens and screens of hentai porn.
The Sadness is perhaps the goriest zombie movie of the last few decades. With a polished production and some incredible, wince-inducing practical effects courtesy of local studio IF SFX Art Maker, it’ll give gore-fiends plenty to chew on. And at a brisk 99-minute runtime, the film sets itself up as a crescendo of gore and bloody spectacle, but The Sadness abruptly runs out of steam in its third act. Instead of leaning into its violently bonkers sensibilities, it attempts to dive deeper into an already thin commentary with a misplaced exposition dump: A virologist waxes poetic about the human condition and the sad procession that led the country to its current, zombie-infested state. It’s bleak, bleak stuff, and there’s still shock value left with a depraved methodology for a cure, but it’s a deflated denouement that adds very little on top The Sadness’s message: “We’re all just selfish, savage monsters.”
