Ariel Lin – Windows on Worlds

Reeling after his wife’s unexpected suicide, a bereft husband begins to discover the destructive effects of unresolved trauma amid the oppressive patriarchal social system of Taiwanese society in Shen Ko-shang’s hard-hitting drama, Deep Quiet Room (深度安靜, shēndù ānjìng). The “deep quiet room” of the title is both literal in referring to that at the back of the couple’s flat they had designated as a nursery where pregnant wife Yu-ting cocoons herself, and to the psychological space into which her husband cannot enter.

Told from Yu-Ming’s (Joseph Chang) perspective, the film centres on his sense of confusion and inability to understand the psychological changes that his wife underwent following her pregnancy which led to her taking her own life. Through repeated flashbacks, it becomes clear that Yu-Ting (Ariel Lin) was suffering from depression and uncertain whether she wanted to give birth to this child. Though everything may have seemed normal on the surface, we can see that there is something not quite right in the way that Yu-Ting interacts with her parents while cryptic allusions are made to two other sisters who are for some reason no longer part of the family while Yu-Ting’s mother is otherwise an entirely silent and passive presence.

This silence and passivity may stand in for that of Taiwanese women, or least those of her generation, who find themselves powerless against male authority figures such as husbands and fathers. When Yu-Ting expresses anxiety that their baby may be a girl, Yu-Ming assumes that his overbearing mother has said something to her reflecting a cultural bias that favours sons over daughters. Yu-Ming appears to not to share it while the doctors at the hospital also stress that the sex is irrelevant as long as the child is healthy. But when Yu-Ting’s father (Chin Shih-chieh) states that girls are better, there is something uniquely chilling in his words that further deepens Yu-Ting’s dread and sense of responsibility in bringing a little girl into this kind of world.

The father cannot be questioned and his home is filled with silence. This is the deep quiet room in which the film seems to suggest all Taiwanese women are to one degree or another trapped inside. Yu-Ming necessarily exists on the other side of it and is to some extent unaware of its existence. He is frustrated that his wife shuts him out and desperately wants to her to share with him what it is that makes her so unhappy and prevents her from embracing the kind of domestic happiness that he is seeking to create. When Yu-Ting unexpectedly snaps that she hates herself for being unable to abandon her father, Yu-Ming seems bemused and replies that it’s a daughter’s filial duty to care for him. His own decision, which seems odd to others, to continue caring for Yu-Ting’s father, who has dementia and therefore can no longer answer for whatever he may have done in the past, is another symptom of his desire to maintain this ideal of a traditional family.

What he discovers therefore implodes Yu-Ming’s conception of the values that he assumed underpinned his society and his own role within them. His eventual decision to abandon Yu-Ting’s father is symbolic of an ultimate desire to reject and escape from this patriarchal superstructure of which he has also been a part. Yu-Ting’s two sisters chose other paths to escaping their trauma, the oldest spending most of her adult life in a psychiatric institution, and the younger fleeing abroad severing all ties with her family. She has married a man who is not Taiwanese and is living a happy family life overseas. Informed of her mother and sister’s deaths, she simply replies “R.I.P” and that it’s no longer any concern of hers. She has sealed her childhood off in its own deep quiet room and now refuses to open the door, suggesting that the only path to survival lies in exiting this system entirely and never looking back.

As such Shen paints a fairly bleak view of the contemporary society as mired in outdated patriarchal social codes while women like Yu-Ting are left with no recourse. She cannot share this part of herself even with those close to her, not even with her sisters who suffered the same way she did but have each withdrawn themselves into different kinds of isolation, and must therefore carry the burden alone. There is however a glimmer of light in the otherwise grim conclusion that suggests a desire at least to exorcise this trauma by abandoning the patriarchal order and building something new in its place.

Deep Quiet Room screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

There’s none so blind as those who refuse to see, as the old saying would have it. Though in Julian Chou’s Blind Love (失明, shīmíng) the problem is often more an obsession with the gaze of others that prevents its lonely protagonists from looking within and coming to an acceptance of themselves along with what it is they really want out of life. Set before Taiwan’s legalisation of same sex marriage, the film positions patriarchal heteronormativity as the cage in which the heroine willingly imprisons herself in fear and shame.

It’s telling that on being discovered with her girlfriend Xue-jin (Wu Ke-xi) when they were university students, Shu-yi (Ariel Lin) immediately jumps to the shame she feels in having done this to her mother. When the two women are together, it’s a bubble of perfect happiness, but on gazing at herself from the outside, Shu-yi feels only disgust in her feelings for Xue-jin and at some point evidently chose “properness” and conformity. Years later, when her mother has lost her sight and is living in a nursing home, she snaps at the nurse not to call her daughter because she’s married to a doctor and therefore very busy. Though it’s an odd moment, she says this with pride as if her own life were fulfilled by her daughter’s “successful” transition to wife to a professional man and mother to his sons. But it also seems as if this continual unseeing as manifested in her mother’s literal blindness is what later leads her to take her own life when forced to look inside herself while otherwise rendered dependent on Shu-yi and her unsympathetic husband Feng (Frederick Lee).

Feng is a selfish and unkind man who rules his home with an authoritarian iron fist. When Shu-yi tentatively hints that it might be better for her mother to live with them, he doesn’t answer but then immediately needles her, asking if she’s put on weight and whether the dress she’s supposed to wear to an important dinner will still fit. The domestic environment is rendered as a prison in which there is no natural light. The furnishings are cold and grey, as if there were no love or warmth here, and Shu-yi is under constant observation to ensure she plays her roles effectively. Feng sees his family only as tools or extensions of himself. He paints the picture of a perfect family to smooth his path to career success by ingratiating himself with the influential Doctor Gu and though Mrs Gu later sees through Shu-yi and is aware of the cracks within her marriage, chooses to unsee them and encourages Shu-yi to do the same by reaccepting her duty to dissolve herself within her husband’s ambitions even if her heart lies elsewhere.

Feng exerts the same pressures on his teenage son, Han (Jimmy Liu Jing), by insisting that he study medicine though Han is now too old to submit himself to his father’s authority. You can’t let others decide for you, he tells a friend, and is told the same by Xue-jin whom he meets by chance and unwittingly falls for not knowing that she is his mother’s long-lost love. Xue-jin might seem like a more liberated soul having divorced her husband and accepted her sexuality while pursing her art as a photographer, which is of course the art of seeing, but her drink problem also hints at her loneliness and unresolved longing for Shu-yi. “You think what we do is wrong,” she tells Shu-yix with frustration, but Shu-yi can only answer, “How could be right?” before returning to her conformist life with all of its misery.

When she tells her younger son Rui that all that matters is how other people view you and asks him why he can’t just be “normal”, it’s as if she’s talking to herself. As the three of them pass through the pride parade and Rui asks what’s going on, Feng tells him that there are two kinds of people, the “normal” and the “abnormal” and that the people parading want to be seen as “normal” though they are not. Shu-yi pushes hard on the accelerator in anger and frustration, but it’s a divide she’s internalised within herself and remains unable to see that her love for Xue-jin is normal and natural. A woman in the bathroom at Feng’s dinner suggestively offers her her lipstick, explaining that it’s “the best form of camouflage for people like us,” before kissing her and leaving having rewakened Shu-yi’s latent desire. Hiding within this world of traditional femininity is the way Shu-yi has chosen to sublimate her desires and the concurrent self-loathing, but is also, in its way, an act of self-harm and means of punishing herself that amounts to a kind of suicide.

Only while making love with Xue-jin does she become fully herself before the self-recrimination finally kicks back in. Their connection is raw and honest, filled with tenderness and yearning, yet Shu-yi struggles to embrace happiness or accept her authentic self by escaping from the patriarchal superstructure represented by her mother and her husband’s authoritarianism. Chou ends on an ambiguous note in which Shu-yi is perhaps learning to see the truth of herself, but her world still appears cold and grey as if suggesting that, in the end, this kind of happiness and fulfilment is still not permitted to her even if she has finally accepted what kind of life it is that she wants.

Blind Love screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Tag: Ariel Lin

Deep Quiet Room (深度安靜, Shen Ko-shang, 2025)

Blind Love (失明, Julian Chou, 2025)