under review

Content Warning:
This review discusses disturbing and graphic content from The Sadness (2021), including sexual violence, assault, gore, torture, and psychological trauma. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

I don’t know what it is about Asian horror — or more specifically, Taiwanese horror — but every film I’ve watched under that umbrella has left me emotionally gutted. The Sadness (2021) was no exception.

As someone who loves zombie and infection-based media, I was psyched when this movie dropped. Since its release, I’ve watched it four times and devoured every review and video essay I could find. When a film hits me this hard, I don’t just watch — I lowkey become obsessed with learning everything about it.

And yet, no matter how many times I return to it, The Sadness still devastates me.

The Sadness is a horror film that wastes no time plunging into chaos—and then keeps pushing further. It blends the high-octane brutality of an infected outbreak movie with the disturbing intimacy of psychological horror. But this isn’t your typical viral apocalypse. The infected in The Sadness don’t just lose control — they become gleefully, sadistically violent, driven to act upon their twisted desires.

What makes The Sadness stand out isn’t just its extreme gore (though be warned: it’s graphic and relentless). It’s how the film uses that violence to explore themes of dehumanization, social collapse, and the thin line between order and chaos. This also came out during COVID, so we can assume that the film and its motifs were partially influenced through sickness, isolation in large, concentrated areas, and maybe seeing sides of folks that we wouldn’t have thought. The cinematography is slick, the pacing is taut, and the performances (especially from Regina Lee and Tzu-Chiang Wang, who play Kat and the “Umbrella Man,” respectively) anchor the film with just enough emotional weight to make it more than a splatter-fest.

If you’re into disturbing, thought-provoking horror that doesn’t flinch — and doesn’t let you look away — this is worth your time. But be warned: it is not for the faint of heart.

I rented it via Amazon Prime. Proceed only if your stomach and psyche are ready.

Keep reading for a spoiler synopsis of the film.

Reading Ahead

The infection is caused by a spontaneous mutation of the Alvin virus — a once-manageable illness that turns grotesquely aggressive overnight. Spread through bodily fluids (primarily blood and saliva), the virus doesn’t kill its hosts. It simply removes every inhibition they have. More than that, the virus becomes a mind-altering plague that drives the infected to commit violent and depraved acts.

We follow Kat and Jim, a young couple separated early in the day as they go about their routines. The city descends into violence fast, and both struggle to survive and reunite as society unravels.

Tension builds quickly, with scenes like the infamous subway sequence (possibly the film’s most iconic moment) setting the tone. The infected don’t just attack — they taunt, smirk, and strategize. They seem aware of what they’re doing. And sometimes, heartbreakingly, they seem to suffer through it too.

What Makes This So Disturbing?

What fascinates me about outbreak narratives, from Romero’s zombies to Train to Busan, is how they explore the idea of the familiar becoming monstrous. The horror lies in watching your neighbors, family, or coworkers become threats.

The Sadness takes this to a new level. The infected aren’t corpses hungry for flesh. They’re conscious. They feel joy when they rape, torture, and kill (and, of course, also cannabalize victims). The virus doesn’t turn them into mindless beasts — it frees them from moral constraint.A similar film that comes to mind is The Crazies, an American horror flick that explores a similar type of infected — where those affected will actually bleed out of their eyes/nose as their infection worsens, and will endeavor to torture or kill non-infected in brutal ways. In their many differences, one similarity is that the infected do retain some of their personhood, even as they act out on their sick urges. This brings back the earlier sentiment of watching someone act in this way — more often, survivors muster up the courage to leave or even kill their reanimated fellows, citing it as an act of kindness; that person no longer exists, and that swaying figure you see is a husk of someone you knew. A person influenced by their own gleeful sadism is harder to fathom.

That urgency and immediacy are baked into the film’s single-day structure. While other outbreak films sprawl over days or weeks, The Sadness unfolds in real-time chaos. There’s no time to process. No breather. Just carnage.

Relatedly, an interesting twist that The Sadness explores is hinted at in the title — as a victim succumbs to this infection, you can sometimes see a tear roll down their cheek. This is apparent early in the film, when we see a tear roll down the cheek of the first instigator on the subway before he unsheathes his switchblade and begins stabbing commuters.

Are they still themselves? Is part of their consciousness trapped inside, witnessing every atrocity they commit? It’s a terrifying proposition: that the worst parts of us don’t need reanimating. They just need permission.

We at least know that they don’t completely forget about previous happenings or people in their lives, as evidenced by the Umbrella Man’s consistency in stalking Kat after her refusal of him. He has the ability to speak, wield a weapon, and strategize how he’ll capture Kat, including narrowing in on her newly-made commuting friend, Molly… more on her later.

We also get a clearer picture of how the infection begins to take hold through Jim’s journey — though “clear” is relative. After being separated from Kat, we follow Jim as he navigates the increasingly apocalyptic landscape, dodging attacks and witnessing escalating horrors. Somewhere along the way, he becomes infected himself — but unlike many of the other characters, we don’t get a definitive moment of transmission.

The List of Deaths Wiki claims that Jim is infected after his neighbor cuts off his fingers, but I’m skeptical of that explanation. For one, the timeline feels off; most infections in the film progress rapidly, often within minutes. Jim’s transformation is more drawn out, with a slow psychological unraveling that suggests a different mechanism at play. Early in the film, we learn that the Alvin virus doesn’t always require fluid transfer to manifest. Some people are simply overcome as their inhibitions erode, replaced by a primal, unrelenting drive. That feels like a more plausible explanation for Jim’s infection — less about blood contact and more about the virus simply taking root and rotting him from the inside out.

What makes Jim’s descent especially disturbing is how insidious it is. At first, he seems… fine. Determined, even. He’s still focused on finding Kat, trying to reconnect. But as he continues through the wreckage, we see cracks form in his perception. One of the most eerie indicators comes when he passes a doll’s head floating in a puddle. But to him, it’s not a toy — it’s a severed human head, grinning unnaturally, as if it’s just brushed with charcoal toothpaste. The hallucination is brief, but it’s telling. It signals that something inside Jim has shifted — the boundary between real and unreal is beginning to dissolve.

This hallucination also serves as a metaphor for what the film does so well: twisting the mundane into the grotesque, and exposing how fragile our sense of control truly is. Jim’s transformation is one of the slowest in the film, and that makes it more tragic. We’re watching someone fall apart in real time — not with an explosion of gore, but with the subtle corrosion of everything that made him human.

In the heat of the intense gore and violence, you really don’t get to ‘care for’ any characters. For instance, I was a bit bummed out when I learned Jim was infected, but I didn’t really know him. In fact, there’s only one part of the film that actually showcases Jim’s personality, and it’s not very good!

Early in the film, before Kat and Jim leave their apartment, they spat about conflicting schedules around a planned vacation. Kat had planned a trip and taken time off from work, but Jim randomly drops that he couldn’t go because he had picked up a shift. Okay, yeah, with that being the only indicator I get of Jim’s personality, I think he’s lowkey a jerk. Not that I’m rooting for him to die (!), but I wouldn’t necessarily say that I care for him while watching him traverse the increasingly apocolyptic landscape. I suppose we don’t know much about Kat, but I feel more partial to her — maybe because we follow her for a majority of the time, maybe because I can sympathize with her struggles and fear as a woman early on in the film. However, considering that we don’t know anything about anyone, I don’t think character development was very high on the list for Jabbaz. This film simply indulges in (very realistic-looking) gruesome kills and torture.

Other Similar Media

Fans of Garth Ennis’s Crossed comics might find familiar ground here too. Sadistic, intelligent infected with a taste for depravity? Definitely. But director Rob Jabbaz has said that The Sadness wasn’t directly inspired by Crossed — rather, it was born from the societal breakdown and r

age he observed during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That urgency and immediacy are baked into the film’s single-day structure. While other outbreak films sprawl over weeks, The Sadness unfolds in real-time chaos. There’s no time to process. No breather. Just carnage.

The Most Unhinged Parts

This movie offered a lot to squirm about: One of those items being Molly’s… “infection.” I can confidently say that all of the kills made me squirm a bit. However, nothing comes close to Molly’s death.

While Tzu-Chiang Wang’s character doesn’t formally have a name, I and others on social media have referred to him as the “Umbrella Man.” Well, readers, now that you’ve triapsed into Spoiler territory, I can share that this lad got this name by stabbing Molly (played by King-Ru Chen) in her eyeball with the tip of his umbrella. His name on the cast list is “Biznesman,” but we can consider “Umbrella Man” a name of endearment.

After forming a fragile bond during the chaos, Kat and Molly try to navigate to safety together. After her eye is bandaged, she’s left in the hallway (?!?!) with a neck brace and in a wheelchair. As fate would have it, who finds her but the Umbrella Man, the person responsible for mutilating her. What happens next? He unzips his pants and sexually assaults MOLLY’S EYE SOCKET. The movie doesn’t explicitly pan to the action, but we see the Umbrella Man’s expression and movement while Molly’s blood-curdling scream echoes down the corridor.

What makes the scene so disturbing isn’t just the graphic violence, but the total emotional and moral annihilation it represents: hope and trust are shattered. Molly’s death is one of the most viscerally upsetting in the film.

Of course, the other deaths are absolutely nothing to slouch at. A bit later, Kat finally gets her revenge and sprays down the Umbrella Man with a fire extinguisher. Before he can collect himself, Kat whacks him with the end of the container and continues to bash his skull in with it until it’s entirely mush, thus covering herself in his blood. The film doesn’t shy away from this scene and continues to flip the video back onto the Umbrella Man’s caved in skull as Kat keeps at it.

Immediately after this point, a doctor pulls Kat into a nearby room of the hospital and handcuffs her in the chemical shower, instructing her to clean herself. Citing that he believes her to be immune, he puts that to the test by injecting her with the virus.

What lingers

At the end of the film, Kat and Jim are united at last. However, Jim is infected and rattles on about how he intends to disfigure Kat and rape her to death. With a metal gate between the two, Kat backs away from Jim, begins laughing and drooling, and runs to the stairs leading to the rooftop where the doctor had called a helicopter.

As we hear gunshots ring out in the distance, we’re left to sit with that uncertainty as Jim bleeds to death, staring into the camera with dilated pupils and a sinister smile on his face. While Kat’s laughing and drooling may serve to signal that she too is now infected, she did just undergo some pretty severe stress and trauma… and she’s staring in the face of her boyfriend who is gleefully talking about how he would torture and assault her — there are stranger ways people have reacted under extreme stress! That might be a stretch, but since we don’t actually see a physical transformation of her becoming infected, we can’t assume that she 100% was infected. And, if she wasn’t infected, does that mean Kat was immune? Was she able to make it to the helicopter without the doctor, or did they just spray her with bullets upon seeing her run onto the landing pad?

In the face of a brutal and devastating apocalypse to this measure, how can there be an ending with a tidy solution or completely wrapped up plot? How can this damage ever be remedied? What if empathy is the only line that separates society atrocity, and it’s thinner than we think?

More than just blood and guts, The Sadness leaves you with questions you don’t want to answer. What if the people we know are already capable of monstrous things? What if all it takes is the right chemical trigger — or social one — to make them act on it?

That’s what makes this film so effective, and so devastating. It doesn’t just suggest that humanity might collapse. It suggests it was barely holding on in the first place.

Watch it. Then sit with it. You might not feel the same about other people — or yourself — afterward.