Tseng Ying-ting's thriller opens with pyrotechnics lightning up the New Year Eve's sky to Yazoo's 1982 smash hit “Only You”, an uncharacteristically romantic environment for a suicide attempt. This sequence is the introduction into the movie's key character, police officer Wu Jie (Janine Chun-Ning Chang) whose plans of ending it all are derailed when a teenager appears out of nowhere and starts banging on her window pleading for help. Her car is actually parked close to the popular gathering spot at the river bank, and Wu decides to get out and see what made the teenagers leave the place in panic. It is there she discovers a bloated corpse washed up on shore. Hit by the paradox of a dead person saving her life, Wu chooses to solve the case despite the anguish she is experiencing at work.
The Abandoned is screening at International Film Festival Rotterdam
There is a serial killer (An-Shun Ju) on the loose with trouble-free access to victims who are an easy prey for criminals. Since they are illegally in the country, the authorities are either unaware of their existence or whereabouts, and there is a long way to establish their identity. In “The Abandoned”, the crime scene is somewhere in Taipei's hidden corners where businesses are run by unscrupulous bosses who employ immigrant workers at starvation wages. In its core, the film is rather an examination of social isolation and malaise that digs for the moral roots of the world's distemper than a pulse-racer, although it doesn't lack in action. The art department of Yeh Tzu Wei creates a sense of mood and place with scarcely lit, dodgy looking streets and run-down interiors of places inhabited by the underprivileged, with dramatic, corney-ish score and photography (by Chen-Wei Liu and Stanley Liu) almost completely drained of color, maximizing its effect.
Action and drama each require their fair share of time and space in Tsen Ying's classically built thriller that combines well seasoned ingredients from here and there. Divided in three acts (although announced so discretely that you just acknowledge the fact without thinking much about it), there are echoes from Diao Yinan's noirs “Black Coal, Thin Ice” (2014) and “The Wild Goose Lake” (2019), with much less thirst for blood. The portrait of the serial killer is straightforwardly clean, rather focusing on his psychopathic nature than seeing him butchering women. There is generally a strong accent on the emotional suit of the film's protagonists. When the main plot gets interrupted to provide a deeper insight into Wu Jie's life, it delivers an explanation of her depressions caused by a heavy loss, and yet it doesn't slow down the film. There is hardly ever a quiet moment in Tseng's thriller about a madman who takes lives of immigrant women, cutting off their ring fingers and ripping hearts out of their chests, because one woman didn't return his affection.
There is a crucial character in the movie's serious attempt at showing that morality is a matter of perspective. Ethan Juan plays You-Sheng Lin, a man trapped between his moral beliefs and the scummy job that puts food on his table. As a middleman between the illegals and business owners, he is both the savior and the devil. When his Thai girlfriend Waree disappears and later on turns out to be the butcher's first victim, You-Sheng struggles between the wish to help the police finds her killer, and the fear of blowing his proteges' cover.
The music has a special place in the movie. Yazoo won't be heard just at the beginning, and the recurring, easily recognizable “Happy birthday” tune feels misplaced before the story puzzle pieces come together.
“The Abandoned” has its Dutch premiere in the Harbour program of International Film Festival Rotterdam. It is the first big screen feature film by the Taiwanese director whose TV movie “The Last Verse” (2017) won Best Performance by an Actor, Best Performance by an Actress, Best Editing, Best Art and Design at TV Golden Bell Awards.
