Tag: Eleven Yao

Dead Talents Society (鬼才之道, John Hsu, 2024)

Posted on by

“Why is it more tiring to be dead than alive?” A fed up ghost asks themselves and with good reason. If you thought you’d be able to rest easy in the afterlife, you’ve got another thing coming because it’s just as much of a capitalist hellscape on the other side as it is here. The central conceit of John Hsu’s Dead Talents Society (鬼才之道, guǐcái zhī dào) is that a ghost must must earn their keep by haunting the living in order to provoke large-scale appeasement rituals and the burning of vast amounts of ghost money or risk disintegration and finally disappearing from this world.

In a certain way, this is the paradox of the ghost. They fear being forgotten and only want to be seen mostly by the living but also by the dead in order to feel the validation that they exist and are appreciated. For Rookie (Gingle Wang) , a teenage girl who it later turns out was almost literally crushed by the weight of parental expectation, this was something she was never able to feel in life partly because of her father’s well-meaning attempts to boost her confidence by telling her she was “special”.  He even went so far as to mock up a fake certificate for her while leaving her to feel inadequate that her sister’s trophy shelves were full while hers were empty. It’s this certificate that’s gone missing during her family’s literal attempt to move on from her death and start again leaving her behind. With no place to return to, Rookie will disintegrate in 30 days if she can’t win a haunting licence which is a problem given her mousey personality and the lack of talent that left her feeling so inadequate in life.

Yet many of the pro ghosts are in the same position. Cathy (Sandrine Pinna) used to be the reigning queen, but her thunder was stolen by a former prodigy, Jessica (Eleven Yao), a very modern ghost who’s figured out how to haunt the internet and go viral for scaring influencers to death. In some ways, the living too are ghosts online haunting an alternate plane of reality while it’s through these online personas that we make ourselves seen. After all, in the modern world, there’s no better way to be “remembered” than by achieving internet fame. By contrast, all Cathy has is her decades old trick of backflipping on guests staying in the hotel room where she died in a lover’s suicide over a man who cared little for her. In a hilarious twist, the gang set up the trick on a harried businessman but he’s so busy he doesn’t even really notice any of their ghost stuff and remains entirely focussed on his work. 

Taken in by the gang, the realisation that rookie begins to come to is that she never really needed to be “special” but only herself and for someone to see her as she really was. Her anxieties are those of contemporary youth burdened by the weight of parental expectation and fearing they can’t live up to it. Manager Makoto (Chen Bolin) experienced something similar in life, struck by anxiety while struggling to make it as a early ‘90s popstar while unable to make his mark in the ghost world by virtue of being unable to scare anyone because he’s too good looking. As he tells it, the best thing about being dead is that you no longer need to worry about what other people think and Rookie is therefore free to become herself or else disappear forever. 

Even so, the irony is that the finale sees the central gangs take on unified appearances as if becoming one with one side doing better than the other in their genuine sense of mutual solidarity as a ghost world family. They watch J-horror-esque movies for tips and muse of the contradictions of fame that perhaps we accord those talented that are merely the most visible while these ghosts struggle to be seen in an increasingly haunted world of hollow influencers and illusionary online avatars. Rookie still doesn’t know what being seen means but has perhaps learned to see and accept herself thanks to her experiences in the afterlife. Charming and somehow warm in its lived-in universe of celebrity ghosts and professional hauntings, Hsu’s zany horror comedy may suggest there’s no escape from the living hell of capitalism but that dead or alive you might as well enjoy the ride as best you can before it all suddenly blinks out.

Dead Talents Society screens Nov. 9/10 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Yaksha: Ruthless Operations (야차, Na Hyeon, 2022)

Posted on by

“Justice is preserved by being just” according to the idealistic hero at the centre of Na Hyeon’s Yaksha: Ruthless Operations (야차, Yacha) , though he’ll eventually come round to his sometime mentor’s belief that “Justice must be preserved by any means necessary”. Any means necessary is indeed the motto of the titular hero named for the unpredictable Buddhist deity and regarded by his superiors as a dangerous maverick though as it turns out he does indeed have justice in mind even if his idea of justice might not fully align with those whom he is intended to serve. 

The failure of the regular justice system is signalled in the film’s opening as idealistic prosecutor Ji-hoon (Park Hae-soo) finds his case against a corrupt CEO falling apart because of procedural mistakes by his own rookie team. Humiliated on the courthouse steps, Ji-hoon is given a punitive transfer to the NIS where he is kept out of trouble, told to draw a salary but given very little work. He and his jaded colleague who was once known as the “bulldozer of justice” but has been ruined by this bizarre form of punishment and no longer has the will do to anything much at all mostly spend their time doing jigsaw puzzles stave off boredom. When his colleague admits there’s no more hope for him and turns down an offer of reinstatement, Ji-hoon agrees to travel to Shengyang, a hotbed of international spies in China, to find out what’s going on with a series of false reports from their agents on the ground led by maverick black ops officer Yakska. 

What he soon discovers is that he’s been dragged into some murky geopolitical shenanigans between North Korean spies, his target’s possibly corrupt team, and the Japanese who are once again up to no good trying to prevent a possible alliance between North and South believing such a union would present too much of a threat to their economic position in North East Asia. His problem is that Yaksha’s field craft does not measure up to what he regards as appropriate conduct. He engages in firefights and commits what seem to be summary executions while later threatening to torture a hostage to force her to reveal the location of their missing asset, a North Korean financial kingpin, Moon (Nam Kyung-eup), who had been acting as a double agent for the Japanese but had become disillusioned with their imperialist outlook and decided to defect to the South bringing valuable information with him. 

It has to be said that however uncountable it may be to see a Japanese spy who behaves like a gangster committing acts of torture in a well appointed lab on a Chinese woman in China, Yaksha cannot exactly claim the moral high ground having attempted to do something similar only in his filthy hideout in an abandoned mine. Ji-hoon’s dilemma is that he doesn’t know whose side, if any, Yaksha is on or if he’s after the North Korean trillions Moon had been managing rather than a hugely beneficial national asset. Exposed to this morally grey world, however, Ji-hoon’s idealist edges begin to soften as shifts towards Yaksa’s “by any means possible” philosophy while trying to stop evil Japanese spy turned lobbyist from recovering the valuable data Moon had to sell and going on to do even more nefarious deeds undermining the possibilities for reunification along with the Koreas’ economic potential. 

Somewhat uncomfortably, the film does then more or less condone torture, betrayal, and summary execution if conducted in the pursuit of “justice” even while simultaneously approving of Ji-hoon’s idealistic pursuit of the rich and powerful who continue to misuse their position and cause pain to ordinary people. It comes to something when the safest ally is a gang of human organ traffickers with whom Yaksha seems to be suspiciously familiar. Nevertheless, what Yaksha eventually asks Ji-hoon to do is to “clean things up” hinting at the duo’s complementary qualities as they pursue “justice” in both the legal and more immediate senses. Filled with some quite literally explosive action sequences along with some admittedly broad comic book antics as the guys face off against Hideki Ikeuchi’s Japanese arch villain Yaksha is certainly a good looking film if one with a dark heart beating at its centre. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)