The Sadness (2021)

directed by Rob Jabbaz

Danny Cohen

“Nothing is entertaining or distracting,” I told Sam (my therapist, the best). I was drowning in grief. I still am. “Comedies aren’t working. It all just rolls off me. I think what I need is something so loud and fast and violent that it blocks out all my thoughts. Something I haven’t seen before. Do you have any suggestions?”

Sam told me she’d think on it and email me. I knew she was at least somewhat into horror because one of my criteria when searching for a therapist was that they should understand my enthusiasm for the genre. I wasn’t too optimistic about her having any suggestions that would be new to me, but it seemed worth a shot. The next day she sent me an email with the subject line, “Resources.” It contained a link to a self-care guide for people with executive dysfunction, another link to an organization that might help me find a suitable trauma support group, and a list of four movies. I’d seen three of them before. The fourth was The Sadness.

I was aware of The Sadness. It had played at Fantastic Fest and some people had been livid about it. They called it empty shock-value trash, said it shouldn’t have been programmed at a festival still working to regain public trust, and claimed that, even though the program’s description contained the word “rape,” there should have been a specific warning that the movie contained multiple sexual assaults. I disagreed with that third criticism and had my doubts about the second, but I also decided the movie probably wasn’t for me. I liked some extreme cinema but I had stopped actively seeking it out back in my twenties.

However, seeing it on Sam’s list, I found myself in a sufficiently nihilistic headspace to think watching The Sadness might be a good idea. I went looking and found that it wouldn’t be released for another two weeks. Sam must have seen it at the festival (small, weird world). I waited, and when it came out I watched it within days. The unrelenting nastiness of it managed to slip inside my isolation tank of misery and give me the first moments of normalcy and forgetting I’d experienced in weeks. I watched it again the following night.

It’s hard to say how many times I’ve watched since. I’ve shown it to friends. I put it on in the background sometimes. For months, every time I cleaned my house I would let The Sadness run on mute while I played records (always metal, another unexpected coping tool).

I hadn’t invited a movie into my life like that since college, when I spent months background-watching Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and the first two Before movies in an endless cycle while I did music theory homework. That behavior made sense; those movies are pleasurable to see and hear. Now, a decimated and flailing version of me who would be utterly foreign to that younger self had, for some reason, walked up to the foulest object he could find and clutched it to his chest like a security blanket.

*

The Sadness is a pandemic movie. It concerns a virus that causes only flu-like symptoms until one day it starts making people uncontrollably horny for violence. “Horny” here is not just an internet-poisoned way of saying “eager.” They are sexually aroused. The streets explode in a frenzy of gleefully-committed atrocities, and young couple Jim and Kat struggle to survive while he makes his way across the city to be with her. I see why people think this movie is empty. The characters are pretty blunt objects, and the plot is so packed with lurid incident (so devoid of very much else, in fact) that it risks feeling more like a collection of events than a story. I see why people think it’s empty. But they’re just wrong.

The Sadness is a pandemic movie in the sense that it portrays a pandemic, but also in the sense that it is an artistic response to our pandemic and its surrounding political moment. Covid shone a bright light on the ugliest parts of many people. Sometimes it seems that it’s more than a revealing light, that its presence in the world actually hardens hearts and creates new ugliness within them. Those infected by the fictional “Alvin virus” are not zombies. They speak and think and have personalities—personalities not completely unrelated to those they had before, but now completely consumed by the desire to inflict pain and revel in depravity. There’s no clean allegory, but it resonates with the open cruelty-is-the-point malice we’ve witnessed so much of in recent years.

*

Covid isn’t the cause of my sadness, my Big Pain, but it colors everything. I wish I could tell you about the Big Pain, its causes, its contours. I want to be an open book, a raw nerve. I want to wear my wounds exposed, wet with the morbid allure only wounds can possess. But I’m afraid that sharing my story too directly and publicly could hurt someone involved in it. So you’ll just have to trust me when I say there’s a pretty good reason I’ve spent much of the last year working to convince myself to stay alive.

*

On my second viewing of The Sadness, less than 24 hours after my first, less than 24 days after the Big Pain’s beginning, the movie started to feel like something more than the howl of rage and despair I’d seen the first time. It started to feel not just cathartic, but compelling.

I realized that the mechanism of “turning,” to borrow a common zombie phrase, was mysterious, seemingly inconsistent. Jim’s virus-denying neighbor turns with seemingly no prompting from anything other than the virus itself. Many others turn as soon as they witness an act of violence. A few keep their humanity until they reach a point of peak stress and trauma. Decent people are more likely to last longer without turning. Assholes mostly turn quickly. There are exceptions to this rule. After all, one can be so much of an asshole that the suffering of others isn’t a significant trauma.

At the moment of turning, sometimes tears will roll down a character’s face. Sadness. Then, horrible joy. The virus makes you sick, but it’s The Sadness that makes you kill. This is a movie about what it takes to break a person. About who breaks, and when, and why. 

*

I often wonder how broken I am, and what it would take to finish the job.

My first viewing of The Sadness coincided pretty closely with me giving up almost entirely on Covid precautions. At the onset of my Big Pain, I was the last person I knew in my own city who was being cautious at all. There are masks in this movie. They never appear on someone who has turned, or on someone who will turn quickly. You know, assholes.

Living in the Big Pain’s shadow, starved for reasons to press forward, I told myself I might literally die if I couldn’t go out, make friends, sing karaoke, kiss people. Has a piece of me broken? Has my heart hardened? Have I revealed an ugly disregard for others that I didn’t previously know I had in me?

About the kissing of people. Depending on how you count things, I’ve been dumped four to seven times in the last year. Sometimes I think I’ve dated so actively and intensely in part because I’m courting those smaller heartbreaks, rushing to feel anything, good or bad, as long as it isn’t the Big Pain. Maybe I like The Sadness because it hurts in a way I can manage. 

And maybe it needs to hurt in order to say what it’s saying well, to pry us open until we can feel its themes rather than merely seeing them. People use the phrase “shock value” and forget that shock has value. Art needs to hurt sometimes. Antonin Artaud once argued that a piece of theater should affect the audience the way a plague affects a city, stirring chaos and laying bare the hidden faces and base impulses of the crowd. Sounds familiar. Artaud was not a well man. Neither am I. Is anyone well anymore?

*

Art needs to hurt sometimes. A lot of the violence in The Sadness is specifically male. The virus is gender-agnostic, but the film’s focus is not. The closest thing it has to a single, central antagonist is a businessman who harasses Kat on the subway shortly before turning and then pursues her with eerie determination for most of the remaining runtime. The threat of rape is constant. Misogynist language is sprinkled throughout like salt. The violence of patriarchal masculinity is a core subject.

Like in any good exploitation movie (and this is true exploitation, written and filmed quickly at the prompting of a financier who demanded pandemic horror), we are offered some catharsis by the end. The predatory businessman gets his head destroyed Irreversible-style with a fire extinguisher in the third act. Another third-act scene sees a recently turned woman giggling, “This is my kiss! I’m kissing you to death!” while she annihilates a rotten man’s offscreen genitals with a surgical saw.

*

About the kissing of people. Every person I have kissed in the last year carries trauma from the actions of at least one man. Most of them, at some point during our involvement, had some kind of painful reckoning with the fact that any intimacy with a man was going to activate that trauma at least a little.  Some were kind and thoughtful about it. Some were not. This connects to, but does not represent the wholeness of, the Big Pain. It’s also something that has haunted me since well before that. I try to be good to those around me but I struggle to be consistently seen for that effort. In my darkest moments, I struggle to believe the effort makes a meaningful difference. I may one day write that essay but I can’t do it here, in the middle of this one.

At the movie’s end, Jim finds Kat. He has turned. It isn’t totally clear when the moment of turning occurred. It may have been the last time we saw him onscreen, or that may have been his last successful attempt to shake it off. It is clear that The Sadness has been seeping in at the edges of his mind since the first moment of acute trauma we saw him undergo. Whatever the case may be, he has unmistakably turned now. Kat shelters from him in a stairwell behind a locked gate. “How does it feel?” she asks.

“It feels… wonderful,” he says, bleeding from the neck and delivering his phrases in an agonizing slow drip. “I feel like… I finally have a purpose in life.”

“What purpose?” Then, the movie’s cruelest knife twist.

“You… you are my purpose. Kat… listen to me… when I heard your voice today… on the phone… you sounded so scared. You said you needed me. I knew I had to find you. I needed to be with you. And then… cut your tits off. And smash your face. Kat, look at me. I’ll peel your skin off… so slowly. Look at me. Kat… Don’t you realize how much I need you? Don’t you realize how much I love you? Hey, I really love you.”

Jim was perhaps a mildly shitty boyfriend when we met him. Mediocre, not uncaring or malicious. And he held on for a long time, witnessed and endured more horror before breaking than most other characters. But man, that last speech. Man. Men. Was his love ever pure and selfless? Or was it composed primarily of desire for the things she could offer him? How different is that love from the destructive love he professes now?

Do I love purely and selflessly? Does any man? Does any person? Are those different questions?

*

Here’s where I admit something uncomfortable. If I could write this essay honestly without admitting this, I would. I wish I could just tell you my Big Pain instead. That would be easier. But here it is: The Sadness is fun.

First off, I’m sorry, gore is cool. I know many people don’t enjoy it, but anyone who doesn’t understand why a decent person who abhors real violence might think movie gore is cool suffers from a failure of imagination that I’m not sure my words can remedy. I could argue that gore can surprise us, elicit laughter, sell narrative stakes, or shake us out of a complacent viewing mode. Art needs to hurt sometimes. But also: Gore is cool. Just plain nifty to look at. And this movie offers no shortage of neat stuff to look at. It’s kinetic, breathless, and occasionally funny. It builds and pays off tension in darkly satisfying ways on a scene-by-scene basis. It’s a precision-engineered thrill ride. There is fun to be had here, if you’re a certain type of person. What is that type of person?

The businessman’s final line, right before Kat caves his head in: “You are just like me. Violent and depraved.” Has my heart hardened?

I don’t mean to say that the film’s nihilism and extremity never upset me. Some scenes were challenging on first or second viewing. In college, I once got my name on the wall of a restaurant for eating a full serving of their spiciest wings. My mouth burned intensely and my stomach suffered for hours. It was a good day. The Sadness is fun. It might fuck your day up, but not all the way. Or at least not the way some movies would. I don’t watch Salò when I clean my house.

I could imagine an argument that this is the problem with The Sadness. That it isn’t upsetting enough, that the level of relative audience comfort it offers betrays the gravity of the loaded subject matter. Are fun and gravity at odds? How much pain is enough? The questions of ethics regarding what should be depicted and how are unfathomably complex. I also find them exhausting, and I’m not convinced they matter all that much in many instances. What I can say with confidence is that this movie has helped me, and if it weren’t both so shocking and so fun, it wouldn’t have. How could I wish it were any different?

*

I set out to answer the question of why this movie has helped me. How it has helped me. I’m not sure if I have. Every answer feels incomplete. Maybe there is no grand unified theory of The Sadness and the Big Pain. But there is a question I can answer: Helped to what end?

The Sadness has helped me hold on to myself and ward off that final breaking. I may still be miserable, but I also go to bed each night still caring whether or not I am good to the people around me, or at least wondering whether I care enough. And I don’t want to be done caring. Or trying. Or kissing. Or watching. Or writing. Or singing. Or breathing.

Danny Cohen is a singer-songwriter and occasional essayist living in Austin, Texas. His music, released under the name Mr. Emotion, can be found on Bandcamp and all major streaming services. He can be found elsewhere online as mr_e_motion or mr-e-motion.