Staying in Taiwan for this next film, a recent addition called The Bride. Before we get into the movie, I'd like to make a small announcement - since we're clocking in at 30 reviews rather than 31, I will be doing a special bonus video. Please feel free to comment below with your suggestions. Also, sorry for this late review. Real life issues kind of kept me from getting to this until fairly late today.
Guest Reviewers: +Frank Fernandez and the Masked Wrestler Los Cien Ranas
So tonight's film is, like the previous two, a product of the upswing in horror films coming from Taiwan and China. Like our previous film, The Tag Along, it takes its inspiration from a modern resurgence of urban legend and folklore in Taiwan, specifically the practice of "Ghost Weddings", where an unsuspecting man is tricked into marrying a girl who died unwed in order to make sure that her soul could successfully enter the afterlife.
Our guest reviewer was specifically interested in a couple of points in this film - the depiction of non-Christian clergy dealing with the supernatural in the form of a Daoist master who assists the presumptive protagonist, and the use of a Chinese spirit board, which is similar in principle to a ouija board but produces quite a lot more information. I found these elements specifically interesting because they address the idea of giving the protagonists of a horror or mystery story their own supernatural abilities, without using them as a short circuit in the story. This actually comes into play with the actual protagonist as well, as this movie does an interesting twist in revealing to us that the person we thought was our hero actually was not.
On that note, this movie was also quite interesting in that almost the entire cast was female and the dialogue actively comments on the fact that Ghost Weddings are tied to paternalistic and patriarchical ideas regarding the afterlife in China's history. Setting those two points of interest aside, though, I think the most interesting thing about the movie is what it says in context with the other two Taiwanese horror films we've watched so far.
There is a tendency when reviewing horror (or, indeed, any fiction) created within and for another culture to assume that that fiction purely expresses the ideals of that culture. If one were to watch Silk, one might walk away with an idea that Taiwan is a very secular culture, while The Tag Along and The Bride both present very different views on traditional culture, folklore and urban legend from their native culture.
The same applies going further back to Cursed, Dead Waves and Four Roads to Hell, each of which often present the supernatural in interlinked by subtly different ways. Our reaction to these films is itself, I feel, an important element to consider when reviewing and discussing them as outsiders. We are seeing how one person, or one group of people working together, was influenced by the elements of their culture, and in doing so we sometimes neglect to consider that - just as with a work of fiction created in our own culture, the person creating it is an individual who is influenced by specific memes and ideas rather than a perfect, objective expression of those ideals.
As we explore the genre of horror in Asian film over the course of this month, and as we go into action and martial arts films in general, it's important to remember that even though films like The Bride and Silk draw from the same stock of visual and cultural elements, we can only really discuss the films in the context of how those influences touched the individual writer's filter, which may seem obvious but - I feel - is an important lesson to be mindful of when you approach another culture's fiction and stories.
Back to the movie at hand, although I've mentioned before that I tend to shy away from value judgments, I want to say that The Bride was probably the best of the films we've reviewed so far. There's very little in either technique or presentation that can be criticized, and I honestly feel that it's one film that will go down as a hallmark of Taiwanese horror. We see a unique vision of ghosts, the supernatural, femininity and traditional culture embedded in the film, and I feel like it's one I can recommend to anyone who might be interested in the genre of horror from China as a good point of entry.
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