The Sadness

• Produced on a budget of roughly NT$100 million (about US$3.5 million), shot over 28 days in Taipei and Keelung amid COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, and released in Taiwan on January 22, 2021.
• Writer-director Rob Jabbaz is a Canadian filmmaker (from Mississauga, Ontario) who relocated to Taipei; The Sadness was his feature directorial debut, shot in Mandarin with an all-Taiwanese cast.
• Nearly all of the film's gore was achieved practically — effects house IF SFX Art Maker spent months building props including a rigged prosthetic head and mechanized 'blood cannons,' with an estimated 99% of the effects done on set rather than with CGI, most famously in the subway-car massacre.
• The film won the New Flesh Award for Best First Feature at the 2021 Fantasia International Film Festival, and later took home Best Picture and Best Director honors at Fantastic Fest 2021.
• Jabbaz has said in interviews that he built in deliberate restraint — keeping the most extreme acts, like sexual violence, largely off-screen — so audiences would stay gripped by the terror instead of writing the film off as shock for shock's sake.

The virus doesn't create monsters—it strips away the performance of civility. Every infected person retains full cognition and speech, suggesting the 'sadness' isn't a disease but a permission slip. The film reads as an argument that social order is the only thing standing between polite society and its appetite for cruelty, and that the infection is barely a pretext.

The government's virus-denial subplot mirrors real-world pandemic disinformation so precisely that the film functions as dark political satire wearing splatter clothing. The officials who dismiss the outbreak while bodies pile up aren't just plot obstacles—they're Jabbaz's thesis statement about institutional complicity dressed in zombie clothes.

Jim and Kat's relationship is framed as the last thread of human connection in a city unspooling into chaos, but the film deliberately refuses to reward their devotion with survival or even dignity. The reading here is that love doesn't conquer anything—it just gives the audience something to lose, making every subsequent act of violence land harder because you saw what was worth protecting.

A viral mutation flips the switch on a Taipei couple's reunion plans, turning ordinary commuters into grinning sadists overnight. But these aren't zombies—they're people who stayed annoyingly lucid while acting on every monstrous impulse. Kat and Jim's attempt to reconnect across a burning city becomes a gauntlet of cleaver-wielding businessmen, virus-denying politicians, and ER butchers who skipped right past brain-eating and went straight to systematic cruelty. Jabbaz dares you to find hope anywhere in the wreckage.