I love Taiwanese movies and this is one time I felt like I got burned. Netflix labeled this as a “psychological thriller,” and it felt aggravatingly not that.
Throughout the film, our main character falls in love with a girl he meets through a book exchange. She’s presented as quirky (ex. books must be used and must be wrapped in bubble wrap when exchanged, ‘because she likes to pop it.’) and as they begin dating, she’s actually unhinged. After a year of dating, he laments that he needs to move into a new place, which will likely be far away due to the rising cost of everything in Taipei. She offers to let him move in with her, since it would be the next logical step in their relationship. Her parents have purchased a place for her in Taipei, so she refuses rent, as long as he pays for a couple of monthly expenses.
Upon moving in, she presents him with a laundry list of rules to follow, which start out sensible: “when you come home, shower and change your clothes before you get into bed,” and end there. One of the big rules is that when he gets home he must leave his phone and wallet on the counter for her to double check everything and that he didn’t lie about his whereabouts throughout the day. It’s a relationship that he thinks is normal, but to me is frightening.
The main character begins emotionally cheating on her with an old high school friend who he reconnects with through work. She is also doing the same. They decide to break up with their significant others, but he cannot bear to be straight-forward to do this. He instead leaves his second phone on the table for her to see. She does, and she doesn’t break up; she decides to change, which involves eating meat (she was a vegetarian), crying and the juice of beef stew dribbling down her chin, without even referencing the phone. However, he’s granted a wish one night in his sleep and he begins dating a third person: a Japanese actress he likes (totally out of nowhere!). In this relationship, she’s also controlling him through talismans and holy water in his food, which he only finds out about snooping. Both relationships are essentially hell for him, but he still decides any relationship is better than no relationship and the movie ends with him next to a woman that we’re unsure which of the three it is.
This movie was frustrating to watch. I felt like this man had no respect for himself and was willing to endure relationships that he and the others around him knew were awful for the sake of just being in one—even though he never admits that. I also felt like this man was kinda awful though, as he got what he wanted every time, but also had the personality of someone who would grow tired with it quickly, even in the best of circumstances. Stylistically, it felt like a movie written by someone who really liked Haruki Murakami and thought the slow-motion scenes of Wong Kar-Wai movies were super cool, but couldn’t pull them off in the same way. I waited for the “psychological thriller” part to drop and realized I was never going to get it. And thus, the movie ended with me as “I guess I’ll just deal with it” as the main character.
3/10