 I first heard about the sadness about three weeks ago when my friend Hubert retweeted Deadline's announcement that Shutter had acquired the exclusive streaming rights to it, alongside a quip about how once upon a time that would have been incredibly his shit, but nowadays not so much. Hubert and I have had many, many discussions about extreme cinema over the years and our relative tolerances to it and how those have changed. He and I both used to love finding the most disturbing, fucked up movies and shoving them into our brains, but as the years passed, not so much. Fantasia International Film Festival is one of the largest and most beloved genre festivals in the world, meaning they inevitably program some really vicious shit. So the fact that they felt compelled to put a trigger warning on this movie and that it was the sadness is a bloodbath full of murder, rape and gore means something. And it didn't really sound like something I wanted in my life in 2022. Yet for some reason it stuck in the back of my brain. Maybe it was the hilariously violent thumbnail for the red band trailer or eventually the trailer itself which I watched out of morbid curiosity. Or maybe it was some sort of self-loathing that I figured watching a movie that would make me unhappy was like the best thing I could do on a random Thursday morning. Whatever it was, I took the plunge. I popped it on and you know what? I was pleasantly surprised. It is really not as bad as I was letting to believe. Like it's rough for sure, but is it? No, I mean yeah, absolutely. But really, yes, of course. Most people shouldn't see this movie, but also should they? No, probably not, but possibly. Anyways, hi. Welcome to the weekly review. You can call me less of a softy than I thought. And today I'm talking about the sadness. We're still relatively early in the pandemic content thing. Stories about pandemics made during the pandemic that we are still in, despite basically everyone having given up on it. Some of these, like the HBO adaptation of Station 11 predate COVID. And the writers made a point to keep the scripts that they'd written before all production ceased after it resumed. While others are purely reflections of this time, though I think it'll be a few years before we see the really good stuff. The sadness is kind of both of these things. Writer, director, editor Rob Jubaz had the seed of the idea for the movie long before lockdowns began, but the millionaire angel investor he wanted to get in on it thought it was a little too heady, originally being centered on a math problem that was so something that it broke people's minds and turned them into homicidal maniacs, more bird box than 28 days later. But when the world went crazy, his financier suggested streamlining his weird concept into something more visceral and immediate. And so the sadness was born. I understand the impulse to call it a zombie movie, but it isn't really. It's closer to the crazies. Romero's horror follow-up tonight at the Living Dead, in which a virus either kills people or turns them, well, crazy. Those crazies become homicidal, but they're still fundamentally people. Similarly, those infected by the sadness' alvin virus retain their memories and continue being able to speak and read and the other stuff you would expect people to be able to do and not really expect of zombies. Although Jubaz's favorite zombie movie, 1985's The Return of the Living Dead, features undead that do retain a lot of those same capabilities, they're also virtually unkillable and still like eating human brains, which the baddies in this film aren't and don't. They're just people who exist solely in service of their own sexual gratification through violence, and we'll come back to that. But this circuitous route to the pandemic setting is likely why Jubaz insists that the sadness is not a political movie and that any reading of it as political people bringing their own pandemic baggage into the experience and he's not responsible for any of it blah blah blah. That's bullshit though because everything is political. And when you have your characters call a virus a hoax, you're intentionally connecting the current experience and making a statement. When an old man harasses a woman on a train and she reasonably says leave me alone and then the old man gets mad at her because he was just being nice and kids these days don't respect their elders or whatever, that's also making a statement. But that one noting the way that people feel entitled to others' time, attention, and bodies, as well as the kind of generational divide that has appeared between people who think telling women to smile is good, actually, and the rest of us, that's much more relevant to the sadness than anything about how our society would crumble in the face of a virus that makes people kill each other. In any case, the only statement that Jubaz is consciously making, the thing that he wants audiences to take away from all of this, is not political at all but artistic. Hey, look at this bold new filmmaker who's willing to push buttons, but also knows that there is a line and you shouldn't cross that line. Don't you want to see him make more cool movies? I'm like, hell yeah, I do. It's honestly a little shocking how restrained the sadness is given that it's about people who are driven to find sexual gratification through violence. Think about that for even a fraction of a second and you can imagine how depraved this movie could be. It could have gone so much farther and harder and it just doesn't. This is a movie about sadists but it is not itself sadistic and that is an important distinction and one I don't think enough people make. Most movies specifically aimed at gore hounds are pretty sadistic, reveling in the misery of their characters. They luxuriate in suffering and that's not fun. I don't like watching people get tortured, maybe back when I was an edgelord adjacent baby, but now I'm old. I've seen too much actual suffering to enjoy real violence played for entertainment. Jebaz says that he aimed to make the violence in the sadness real, but it sounds like more bullshit. The first thing I saw in that wild trailer is the nightmare on Elm Street, Esca Geyser of blood shooting from a man's shoulder onto a subway car ceiling. And while that is one of only two moments in the film so cartoonish, the fact that they aren't completely out of place reflects how heightened it is throughout. Like I've read about a lot of stabbings on the New York City subway in recent months and I didn't think about them once while seeing the same thing happen to a bunch of people in the sadness because it feels distinctly cinematic. It's a good-looking movie with sun-drenched exteriors and blood-drenched interiors. The gore effects here are almost entirely practical, which you really don't see enough of these days, but you can really feel the difference, especially in lower budget films like this one. It is so visceral. But at the same time, it doesn't cross the threshold of being like truly horrific. Your mileage will vary here and more squeamish folks will probably want to turn it off at the first sign of violence. An old woman pouring boiling liquid on a dude's face and tearing off his bubbling flesh. But it's also done in a couple of seconds. It's there long enough for you to understand what's going on and be impressed by the effect and then it's over. And that's how the entire movie is. These sadists talk a lot about torture, but we see very few people actually being tortured because that would be, ew, no thank you. Instead, we just get like a swimming pool of blood, so much that it definitely borders on comical at times. And there is one scene late in the film that genuinely made me laugh. I'm not sure that it was supposed to per se, but I was just kind of imagining the people immediately off-screen spraying fake blood and throwing viscera at the person being made. I don't know, it was a funny image. But to be clear, this isn't a comedy. The sadness is not an ironic name, which was something Jabaz apparently had difficulty conveying to collaborators early on in the process because there's a lot of dialogue, particularly from the infected, that skirts the line between scary and absurd. I think the most famous example of this sort of thing is the classic line from the Exorcist, Your Mother Sucks Cox in Hell. Is that line funny? Out of context, it's a pretty silly sentence. And seeing it come out of the mouth of a little girl with all her fucked up prosthetics is also a little silly, but in context of the movie, it's unnerving. Here's a demon who briefly took the form of a priest's mother as a way to get into his mind. What the demon's saying could be true. He would know. Decades later, it is hard to genuinely claim that that scene is still scary, but it shows that there is a way to take this sort of thing seriously, which is what the sadness does. Its monsters say absolutely vile shit, detailing what they plan to do once they catch their victims. It is really fucked up. But in a way that someone a bit more twisted might want to play for laughs, Jabaz doesn't do it like that. And I'm glad because it is objectively horrifying what they're saying, and I'd rather not feel like that wasn't being taken seriously. Which brings us to everyone's favorite subject, rape. The trigger warning said that the sadness is full of it, and that is a pretty significant exaggeration. Yes, the movie features sexual violence notably aimed at both men and women, but I'm pretty sure I could count on one hand the number of times we're actually made aware of it, and it's mostly or entirely off-screen. It's never graphic and is rarely prolonged with a single notable exception that is probably the most unpleasant sequence of the entire movie, but it's also something that a Serbian film literally shows. It's not that. While the sadness does not. I read an interview where Jabaz was asked about that moment in particular, and if hiding it was like a studio note or something, and he had the real version hidden away, and he was like, bro, no, what? Because no one wants to see that shit, and anyone who does should probably be in jail. And I don't love that it's there or even like it a little bit, but I am far more accepting in this context and with this style. It is not shoving your face in it for the sake of it. It's built into the story, and yet it feels appropriate, or at least as appropriate as a movie like this is going to feel. Being edgy isn't cool. Being as depraved as possible isn't something to be proud of. It is easy to depict suffering and make audiences feel gross and whatever, and to a certain group of people, that's enough. And they will let filmmakers get away with the fact that they didn't actually make something interesting. As long as the special effects are good, they'll accept schlock. The sadness isn't schlock, and there are substantial stretches of the movie that don't feature much violence at all, which both surprised and impressed me, because those sections work every bit as well as the gory stuff. They are tense and well-directed, proving that jabaz is not using the effects as a crutch, but as a tool. It's clear that a lot of thought went into all of this, and we stand thoughtfulness on this here YouTube channel. But despite all of that, there are a lot of people for whom this movie will be too much. You need to have a relatively strong stomach for gore, and be willing to accept that this movie depicts sadistic monsters doing sadistic monster things. For some, probably most, that's a deal-breaker. Fair enough, this is not a movie that you escape to. It is bleak as hell, even more so, since we're now in a world that's increasingly given up on handling the virus that inspired its final incarnation. But if you're okay with that, then go for it. You're almost certainly going to like it, and you may well love it. This movie promises the start of a fascinating career. Jabaz's next project, an expansion of his 2020 short Clear Water, seems like a solid foundation and one that will prove, or not, his versatility within the horror genre. But I'm excited as heck to see where he goes from here. 8.0 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching, thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, my cat, Cat Seracotta, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I Am The Sword, Maddie Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindy's, Andrew Madison Design, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, great. If not, don't care. If you want to see more, please subscribe. Hope to see you in the next one.