Shudder’s new zombie movie The Sadness is exceptionally brutal, but it aims for more

polygon.com:

Ever since George Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead turned a monster movie into a meditation on institutional racism, zombie movies have been one of the horror genre’s most effective vehicles for sociological observations: Dawn of the Dead takes down consumer culture, while Shaun of the Dead parodies the soul-killing nature of routine work and life. But that doesn’t mean every zombie movie has to take on big topics about the state of humanity. With The Sadness, Shudder’s new Taiwanese sort-of-a-zombie-movie, freshman Canadian writer-director Rob Jabbaz certainly wants to join the ranks of those classics. But he can’t find the proper measure of finesse and shamelessness to marry his grotesque gore and violence to, given the moral lessons he seems to think he’s obligated to offer.

The Sadness, loosely inspired by Garth Ennis’ Crossed comic series, follows a young couple in Taiwan, Jim (Berant Zhu) and Kat (Regina Lei). Jim drops Kat off at work just hours before a zombie(ish) outbreak that leaves them searching for each other amid the chaos. These infected aren’t traditional zombies. Jabbaz substitutes something more gruesome: His highly contagious virus, which shares similarities to rabies, cause victims to act out their most sadistic impulses. They have no shame and no power to stop themselves — and they give in to their horrifying urges with wide, unwavering grins on their faces.

[Ed. note: The rest of this review includes brief descriptions of some particularly grotesque acts of physical and sexual violence.]

That’s a fine enough premise, but Jabbaz focuses too much on trying to find a profound metaphor that isn’t there, rather than letting the setup just be an excuse for some of the most gratuitous and