The Sadness — The Apocalypse of Human Depravity and the Ultimate Pandemic Gorefest

📺 Where to watch ES

Prime Video ↗ ▶ Planet Horror Amazon Channel ↗ ▶ AMC+ Amazon Channel ↗ Apple TV+ ↗

All options →

The Sadness isn’t just a movie—it’s a social experiment filmed in viscera, a slap in the face to cinematic moralizing, and a grim reminder that when the world goes to hell, all that’s left is humanity’s most primal and repulsive instincts. Rob Jabbaz, a Canadian with more guts than every mainstream horror director combined, makes his feature debut with a film that doesn’t just redefine the infected subgenre—it spits on it, chews it up, and spits it out again with absolute contempt for convention. Forget Romero’s zombies, who at least had the decency to be slow and tragic; forget the infected in 28 Days Later, who ran like maniacs but still clung to a shred of humanity. Here, the "Alvin" virus doesn’t turn people into beasts—it turns them into hyper-intelligent, sadistic versions of themselves, capable of savoring every second of their own depravity. It’s as if A Clockwork Orange and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom had a bastard child in a slaughterhouse, and that child grew up obsessed with practical gore and unrelenting nihilism.

finalExplicado_en: "In the climax of The Sadness, the infected erupt into a final orgy of mass rape, mutilation, and slaughter across the city while the few remaining uninfected are hunted down. The protagonist’s desperate attempt to reach safety ends in futility as he is cornered, tortured, and killed by the gleefully sadistic horde, with no cure or escape. The ending is a nihilistic gut-punch that declares humanity was already rotten; the virus merely strips away the last fragile pretense of civilization, leaving only the naked, ecstatic depravity that was always lurking beneath. There is no redemption, no hope, only the triumphant laughter of a species that finally gets to indulge its truest self."

Taipei as Urban Hell: When Civilization Becomes a Slaughterhouse

The setting of The Sadness is Taipei, a city that, in Jabbaz’s hands, transforms into a labyrinth of horrors where every corner hides a new atrocity. The director doesn’t bother building a post-apocalyptic world with clear rules or pseudoscientific explanations; here, chaos erupts overnight, and the only thing that matters is how the characters (and the audience) survive (or don’t) the orgy of violence. The premise is simple: Jim (Berant Zhu) and Kat (Regina Lei), a young couple, try to reunite amid societal collapse. But reducing The Sadness to a love story in pandemic times would be like saying Irreversible is just a movie about a man looking for his girlfriend in a nightclub. What really matters is the journey—and that journey is a nightmare of biblical proportions.

Jabbaz has no patience for subtlety. From the first act, the film plunges headfirst into a spiral of graphic, morally repugnant violence. The infected aren’t zombies—they’re full-blown psychopaths: they weep with pleasure as they rape, torture, and mutilate their victims, all with a smile on their faces. The "Businessman" (Tzu-Chiang Wang), a sharply dressed office worker who becomes the film’s most iconic villain, is the perfect embodiment of this horror. His pursuit of Kat in the subway is a masterclass in pure tension, filmed with a rawness that recalls the best moments of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Cannibal Holocaust. But where Tobe Hooper and Ruggero Deodato were content to suggest horror, Jabbaz shows it without filters, with a ferocity that borders on the pornographic.

Practical Effects: When CGI Looks Like a Cartoon

In an era where commercial horror has grown lazy and reliant on CGI, The Sadness is a breath of fresh air (or, more accurately, a nauseating stench). Jabbaz and his team decided that if they were going to make a film about human depravity, they had to do it with practical effects that felt real, disgusting, and tangible. And boy, did they deliver. The violence in The Sadness isn’t just graphic—it’s physically uncomfortable. Arterial blood spurts in gushes, dismemberments feel like they’re happening in real time, and the makeup on the infected is so detailed you can almost smell the rot.

Some sequences seem lifted straight from a forensic anatomy manual. The subway car assault, for example, is an orgy of violence that blends the chaos of Train to Busan with the brutality of Martyrs. But where Train to Busan used CGI to soften the blows, The Sadness doesn’t pull any punches: the effects are so real you’ll wonder if Jabbaz hired a team of butchers to choreograph the scenes. Then there’s the hospital sequence—a nightmare of eye mutilations and gang rapes designed to provoke either vomiting or applause at an extreme film festival. It’s exploitation cinema elevated to art, but without losing an ounce of its original rawness.

Cinematography and Editing: Elegance Amid the Chaos

The most surprising thing about The Sadness is that, despite its brutality, it’s not an ugly film. Quite the opposite: Jabbaz and cinematographer Jie-Li Chen prove that gore can be visually stunning if filmed with intelligence. The color palette is cold and clinical, with blues and grays contrasting against the deep reds of blood, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon. But where Refn used color to craft a dreamlike aesthetic, Jabbaz uses it to emphasize the rawness of what’s unfolding on screen.

The editing, handled by Shieh Meng-Ju, is another standout. Jabbaz doesn’t just show gratuitous violence—the choreography of the action scenes is impeccable, with long takes that leave you breathless and quick cuts that amplify the sense of chaos. The subway sequence, for instance, is filmed with surgical precision, alternating close-ups of the characters’ faces with wide shots that capture the horror on a grand scale. It’s a difficult balance, but Jabbaz pulls it off with a mastery that belies his debut status.

Performances: When Terror Becomes Personal

In a film as extreme as The Sadness, the acting could have faded into the background, but Jabbaz was lucky to have a cast that not only holds its own but elevates the material to another level. Berant Zhu and Regina Lei, as Jim and Kat, are the audience’s eyes in this hellscape. Their chemistry is palpable, and their desperation feels real, especially in scenes where they struggle to survive in a world that’s become utterly hostile. But where the film truly shines is in its villains, particularly Tzu-Chiang Wang’s "Businessman."

Wang is, without a doubt, the film’s breakout star. His portrayal of the sadistic office worker is so disturbing it borders on the supernatural. He’s not your typical villain—he’s an everyman who, upon infection, discovers his darkest pleasures and indulges in them without remorse. His smile, his tears of ecstasy as he commits atrocities, his predatory pursuit of Kat—everything about his performance is pure distilled evil, and it’s impossible to look away. He’s the kind of villain who lingers long after the credits roll, like Captain Vidal from Pan’s Labyrinth or the killer in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

Soundtrack: Silence as a Weapon

The music in The Sadness is minimal but effective. Composer Owen Wang opts for a score that doesn’t compete with the on-screen horror but complements it. There are moments when the absence of music is as eloquent as a symphony, particularly in the tension-filled scenes where silence becomes a character in its own right. When the music does appear, it’s sporadic—dark synthesizers and ethereal choirs that recall Colin Stetson’s work in Hereditary. It’s a smart choice: in a film so visually overwhelming, the music doesn’t need to be flashy—it just needs to work.

Cinematic Comparisons: Where Does The Sadness Fit?

The Sadness isn’t an easy film to classify. On one hand, it’s extreme horror, in the vein of Martyrs, A Serbian Film, or The Human Centipede. But unlike those films, which often veer into self-parody or gratuitous shock, The Sadness has an artistic ambition and thematic coherence that elevates it above mere gore. On the other hand, it can also be seen as a postmodern zombie film, though with a sadistic twist that sets it apart from genre conventions. If 28 Days Later explored the fear of losing humanity, The Sadness takes it a step further: it celebrates that loss and turns it into a spectacle.

There are also echoes of Battle Royale in how Jabbaz portrays violence as a macabre game, and of The Purge in its critique of social hypocrisy. But where The Purge stays on the surface, The Sadness descends into hell and wallows in it. It’s as if Jabbaz took the worst of humanity, put it under a microscope, and decided to film it through a magnifying lens.

Unrelenting Nihilism: Art or Mere Provocation?

The big question after watching The Sadness is: how much horror is too much? Jabbaz doesn’t mince words—his film is a full-frontal assault on the audience’s sensibilities, a work that doesn’t aim to entertain but to unsettle, disturb, and ultimately leave an indelible mark. There’s no redemption, no hope, no comforting message about human goodness. All that’s left is chaos, violence, and the certainty that when everything collapses, human beings are capable of the worst atrocities.

This can be seen as a virtue or a flaw, depending on your tolerance for nihilism. For some, The Sadness will be a masterpiece of extreme horror, a film that redefines the limits of what cinema can show. For others, it’ll be an unbearable experience, a succession of repugnant scenes with no purpose beyond provocation. But even the latter will have to admit one thing: Jabbaz holds nothing back. There’s no censorship, no self-restraint, no concessions to the audience. The Sadness is what it is: a black pit of depravity filmed with perverse elegance.

The Best

• Tzu-Chiang Wang, the villain Hollywood doesn’t deserve: His portrayal of the "Businessman" is so disturbing it should come with a mental health warning. He’s the kind of villain who makes Hannibal Lecter look like a toddler throwing a tantrum.

The Worst

• Video game structure with cardboard side characters: The script moves like a 90s beat ‘em up: Level 1 (the apartment), Level 2 (the subway), Level 3 (the hospital)... and so on until the end. The side characters are as deep as a puddle, and their only purpose is to die creatively.

The Verdict of Claqueta Ácida (8.7/10)

🎬 Tráiler Oficial

Abrir en YouTube

Click para reproducir

HD Tráiler