TIFF21: Terrorizers
It’s easy to take many things for granted: a relationship, a job, even a news headline. Ho Wi Ding’s Terrorizers shows how important context is for every single one of these things and explores the ways they interact, with each new assumption reshaping the whole. The film’s name is a nod to Edward Yang’s 1986 classic from the Taiwanese New Wave, which also spent much of its runtime charting spiralling relationships and uncertain dramatic contexts among the anonymous high rises of Taipei. Ho’s film lives up the homage, creating a startling portrait of contemporary malaise and disconnection in the process.
The plot weaves together the lives of various young people living in Taipei and their intersecting personal and romantic struggles. There’s Yu Fang (Moon Lee), a young acting student, Monica (Annie Chen), a cam girl who wants to become an actress, Xiao Zhang (JC Lin), a chef who’s in love with Yu Fang, Kiki (Pipi Yao), a high school student and aspiring cosplayer, and Ming Liang (Austin Lin) a disaffected young man absorbed in video games and porn who ties all these individuals together. In the opening 15 minutes, the film seems to be a relationship drama about Yu Fang and Xiao Zhang as we witness them reconnect and start up a tender romance. But then Yu Fang is attacked in a train station by a young man with a sword who turns out to be Ming.
From there on out, Ho shifts forward and backward in time, jumping from one character to the next and back again, to draw a fuller portrait of Ming’s attack and the context of all the relationships between the characters. The jumps back and forward in time and between characters are often subtle and there are no filmmaking markers to let us know when they’ve occurred. At moments, we assume we’re seeing what happens far after the film’s opening event only to realize we’re seeing what happened long before. The approach has several hallmarks of the network narrative or hyperlink drama, but the key difference is that these characters interact with each other. As well, this film doesn’t prioritize theme over character or burden individual events with allegorical meaning. The meaning is in the way the characters interact or don’t, the way they understand each other or fail to, and the way that events are recontextualized and their meaning deepened through repetition and investigation.
Midway through the film, you’d be forgiven for questioning whether there’s any meaning to the whole. Sure, Ho and cinematographer Jean-Louis Vialard conjure a gorgeous, muted visual tone for the film. They shoot mostly in soft focus with a neutral colour palette that strips the Taiwanese capital of its tropical vibrancy, which mirrors the emotional confusion of the characters. Sure, there are tasteful incorporations of Chopin’s etude “Op. 10, No. 3 (Tristesse),” which mines the way the composition has become a cultural meme for melancholy. But many films can be pretty and tasteful and made with artistic intent without being all that worthwhile. So you wonder whether Ho is simply padding his film with interesting thematic investigations into identity, media, misogyny, loneliness, and voyeurism without bringing new understanding to any of these avenues.
But eventually we start to understand these characters better and Ho recontextualizes all the interactions and events that happen early in the film. Once the context becomes clear, the film clarifies in a rather stunning manner. The moment it all clicks together is exhilarating, revealing a genuine artistry in Ho’s ability to weave together all these complex relationships in ways that seem humanly accidental. The film also sharpens its focus around Ming and reveals itself to be a remarkably, even controversially, astute examination of an incel, for lack of a better word.
As we watch Ming interact with the other characters, we come to understand his restricted and lonely way of seeing the world. We watch his media consumption, primarily through video games and porn, his distant relationship with his rich and enabling father, his social isolation, and, most importantly, his voyeuristic relationship to women. Ming does not understand women but he is obsessed with them and constantly watching them, following them, thinking of them. But he hardly interacts with them. His only moments of vulnerability come with Hsiao (Ning Ding), an elegant, chain smoking masseuse he sees, and to an extent, Kiki. But what he reveals to these women is often accidental and hardly flattering.
But the film understands the social and personal reasons behind Ming’s behaviour, as well as the larger, more ephemeral, reasons for why Ming is drawn to do what he does. A pair of scenes clarify just how perceptive and complex the film’s portrait of Ming can be: one is a revisit of the inciting sword attack from Ming’s perspective, the other an encounter with Kiki that follows immediately after. Both show the two sides of Ming, drawn to radically different actions with different moral outcomes but which are ultimately motivated by the same urges and anxieties in both occasions.
It’s in the combination of these sorts of moments that the film achieves its clarity, perhaps in a way that some viewers might find overly sympathetic, but such is the price of meaningful art. Sometimes you have to get a little uncomfortable to come to a greater understanding of the world. Terrorizers is uncomfortable, challenging, even provocative, but it’s also startling and sensitive to the human condition. It’s the sort of quiet drama that catches you off guard.
8 out of 10
Terrorizers (2021, Taiwan)
Directed by Ho Wi Ding; written by Ho Wi Ding and Natasha Sung; starring Austin Lin, Moon Lee, Annie Chen, JC Lin, Pipi Yao, Ning Ding.
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