In a world where the mainstream tends to play it safe these days, it is refreshing to see that anything goes in The Tenants Downstairs (樓下的房客), with massive amounts of sex, gore and psychological manipulation that brings the viewer on an unapologetic journey into the dark corners of the human soul.
Our guide through this madness is the unrepentant, disheveled landlord (Simon Yam, 任達華), who spies on the eight seemingly normal but dysfunctional tenants (chosen by him) in his six-room building through hidden cameras. Yam, who has excelled in perverted or psychotic roles back in his native Hong Kong, does a pretty good job with the role of dirty old voyeur at first (the only problem is his Cantonese accent as a Taiwanese character), but his performance reaches another level when the events take a turn toward the deranged as his character decides to interfere with the tenants’ lives, in a very, very sinister way.
Previously shown at the New York Asian Film Festival and the Taipei Film Festival, the movie is an adaptation of Giddens Ko’s (九把刀) novel of the same name. Even without reading the original work, it is safe to assume that the screenplay, also written by Ko, was not toned down too much for the big screen. It as a decent effort from first-time director Adam Tsuei (崔震東), who is not unknown in the entertainment world as a former Sony Music bigwig and producer of two other Ko adaptations, You are the Apple of My Eye (那些年，我們一起追的女孩) and Cafe. Waiting. Love (等一個人咖啡).
Photo Courtesy of atmovies.com
Despite the explicit material, it is still a mainstream film and the story is easy to follow, with the pacing tense and appropriate for the intended audience. The sex and violence pushes the boundaries at times, but as a whole is not excessively graphic, and palatable for the average viewer.
The supporting cast also delivers strong performances that are equally absurd and believable, from the cold, ghostly and eerily sweet Yingru (Ivy Shao, 邵雨薇) who does nefarious things in the bathroom and Chang (Kaiser Chuang, 莊凱勛), the pent-up, also voyeuristic gym teacher, to a sexually repressed father who bathes and shares a bed with his young daughter (Yu An-shun, 游安順). Lee Kang-sheng (李康生), who plays a gay man who is having a secret affair with his younger student, is brilliant as he alters between stoic calmness and bursts of melodrama.
This colorful bunch of people all have their unspeakable desires and secrets, and it is Yam’s job to draw out the worst in them. There is not much to hold them back here — through the all-seeing eye, everybody is completely exposed, and there is no place to hide.
In stark contrast to the disturbing series of events, the scenes are beautifully shot, with slick editing and atmospheric play of light, shadow and color. The mostly-orchestral music is also jarring, and adds to the insanity of it all by making depravity seem almost elegant. The film also keeps it funny, and even during the darkest moments you laugh because of the ridiculousness of what is unfolding.
If you pay enough attention, the film contains many surreal details from the very beginning, leading up to a rather disappointing ending where the filmmakers abruptly shift focus and try to resolve and sum up everything to no avail, leaving more questions than answers. It is a pity, as a film like this is meant to be enjoyed at face value. After 95 minutes of sheer absurdity, the last thing we want is logic.
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS