Author Chris Van Laak
The Netflix homepage is overwhelming by design. It entices you to watch, watch, and watch some more, guided by an algorithm that knows your taste better than you know yourself. If you narrow the selection down though, you’ll find plenty of Taiwanese fare on Netflix, especially if you log on from Taiwan (virtually or actually), but also from other locations.
Maybe a little guidance would help, I thought, at least for those who are not so familiar with what Taiwan’s creative industries have to offer. And the others—I mean the Netflix buffs who are way more familiar with Taiwanese films and series than I am—may now judge my taste.
However, I’d like to start by stating the obvious: I am fascinated by Taiwan’s dark underbelly of organized crime and exploitation, and the general nastiness often found at the fringes of society, in Taiwan and elsewhere. This is the fare I’m looking for, and this is what I found:
The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon (周處除三害)
Let’s start with something fun. With his latest Hong Kong-style action film, director Wong Ching-Po (黃精甫) stays true to his roots. This means The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon is, in its best moments, a fast-paced, light-hearted movie that keeps you on your toes, even though it’s a bit too formulaic for my taste.
The movie centers on Chen Kui-lin (played by Ethan Juan, 阮經天), one of Taiwan’s fiercest hitmen, who is brought to the verge of “breaking good” by a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. However, instead of turning himself in to police, he decides to embark on another killing spree, this time for a good cause, or at least one the viewer can maybe agree with.
Some of the movie’s fistfight-to-death scenes are a bit too long for my taste, but I guess this is what the rules of the genre determine. When, for example, one of the combatants draws his gun at the end of such a scene, to finish off the other party execution-style, I tend to ask myself why the film stole five minutes of my life. This happened a few times during The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon.
On the other hand, the film really shines when it dives deep into absurd plot lines and pushes the story to the boundary of what is credible. The film always stays on this side of the boundary though—the side of great, absurdist fun.
A Sun (陽光普照)
Chung Mong-hong’s (鍾孟宏) film had been on my radar for quite a while; the drama centered on the son of a Taiwanese working-class family has been smiling at me from the Netflix homepage since 2020. A Sun also delves into the world of organized crime, but in contrast to The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon, its protagonist, Chen Jian-ho (played by Wu Chien-h, 巫建和), is trying to stay away from crime after he spends one-and-a-half years in juvenile detention.
Hailing from a family that already has plenty of unresolved issues to deal with, Jian-ho’s involvement with a particular gangland “friend” adds another layer of complication.
A Sun takes its subject matter seriously as it sheds light on the complex psychology of family life at a breaking point. It’s not light-hearted fun, but lovers of New Taiwanese Cinema will find a lot of fodder for thought in A Sun.
The Abandoned (查無此心)
Tseng Ying-ting’s (曾英庭) film follows the dramatic arc of a classical whodunit, but what makes it stand out is that it doesn’t shy away from topics that have long been taboo in Taiwan. That is, in the first place, the exploitation of Southeast Asian migrant workers, but also mental health.
The film begins with the suicide attempt of Wu Jie, a Taichung police officer played by Janine Chang (張鈞甯). Her plan gets interrupted when the dead body of a migrant worker is found by passersby. In the course of the film, more bodies turn up as a visibly mentally unwell Wu Jie takes on a case, dragging herself from one crime scene to the next.
The Abandoned is also a bit too formulaic for my taste; I feel like I have seen movies before in which an investigator enters an unlikely alliance with a bad-guy-turned-good who is embroiled in the case, while the police bureaucracy wants her to wrap up the investigation as quickly as possible. However, at the end, The Abandoned delivers, with a worthy climax and characters that are complex enough to keep the audience engaged.
The Abandoned also offers a great opportunity to practice your Chinese, as there are no English subtitles available.
Detention (返校)
The eight-episode miniseries is a time-bending tale centered on Liu Yunxiang, played by Lee Ling-Wei (李玲葦). She is a teenager who, after seeing “strange things,” is transferred to a high school in a remote forest haunted by ghosts of the past. Detention is an adaptation of a popular video game and an “alternative, extended version” of a movie of the same name that first brought the storyline to the big screen a year earlier.
What’s remarkable about the series, and better than in the movie, is the interplay of ambiguities. While the video game is set in the 1960s, deep in Taiwan’s authoritarian era, and the movie is set shortly after Taiwan becomes a democracy, the action in the miniseries takes place in 2000—long enough after the end of the authoritarian era to give the ghosts of the past an even more uncanny quality, and close enough to the present to be hauntingly engaging. Detention has it all: Teenage angst-fueled drama, demonic authoritarian figures and a dramatic arc that leaves the audience speechless.
Also here, no English subtitles are available.
Port of Lies ( 八尺門的辯護人)
Similarly to The Abandoned, the eight-episode miniseries focuses on labor exploitation, but this time the topic is approached from the angle of another classic genre: The courtroom drama.
Port of Lies starts with a gruesome murder and then follows Tong Baoju, a defense attorney played by Christopher Lee (李銘順), from the gritty, rain-soaked Port of Keelung to a stuffy courtroom in which no justice is to be had, for the most part at least.
The case, and the structures of injustice that the investigation reveals, send shockwaves through the local community and force Tong to confront the shortcomings of the legal profession, as well as his past conduct in the courtroom.
Port of Lies is a masterpiece in storytelling and a lesson to be learned.
