TIFF 2021: Terrorizers
TIFF 2021Terrorizers takes inspiration from non-linear story romps like Jackie Brown or Go. Like them, Ho Wi Ding’s new film follows perspectives of different characters through the same events. Once Terrorizers passes through the events once from one character’s POV, the film resets, goes back in time, and goes through the same period again from another. It’s a dynamic technique that allows a filmmaker to take a step aside from focusing on plot to drilldown on the characters’ journeys because with each pass the film takes through an event in a film, more nuance and depth is added. In the case of Terrorizers, the story back-pedals to supply the motivations of a group of lost twenty-somethings who are trying to find their way through life and love until the film makes its way to a rather shocking public attack.
What Terrorizers uncovers through its various narratives says a lot about the Zoomer generation being an at-risk, entitled lot. Generation Z, the film posits, features not only a tech-device- and social-media-obsessed collective culture, but also one with niche interests and driven dangerously by self-satisfaction. Cosplay, personalised porn, mobile video game addiction, and influencer culture all get a nod here via the various characters. It’s good to have your hobbies, but Ho Wi Ding is suggests that all of this niche engagement with no moderation can lead to trouble. Kiki – the high school cosplayer – gets her kicks from sexually exciting her friend and prank calling strangers. Monica – a struggling actor trying to erase a brief stint in making porn – drowns in debt in order to maintain her loose grip on being some sort of an influencer. Ming Liang – who is the foremost cautionary tale among the character list – is a wealthy, unappreciative, entitled guy obsessed with video games and Monica’s old website. Generally speaking, his unhealthy engagement with trending video games and lack of socialisation with family and peer groups has set him on a treacherous path. He has no sense of boundaries or how to regulate his feelings, much less any people skills to speak of. His story encapsulates ‘Incel’ culture, and it’s a genuine fright. Herein is where it may be easy to blame video game culture, society’s vices, or addictive tech. There’s a discussion there, but the Terrorizers reveals that the greater problem lies in parenting and coaching from older generations. Ming Liang is the central terror in the film, and he’s not without moments of care. However, he seems to have had no parenting, no one to model decency. Ho Wi Ding’s Terrorizers, in its own way, is a pamphlet promoting parental engagement with your kids. Terrorizers isn’t without its own empathy and efforts to understand. A middle-aged masseuse whom Ming Liang befriends reveals that the older generation hasn’t always had it easy either.
Terrorizers is a well crafted character thriller. The atmosphere broods as its characters brood, and when the narrative pops back in time to revisit the scene from another perspective, that brooding is given depth and nuance. Ambitious in its themes and structure, and effective in its suspense and occasional explosiveness, Terrorizers is an impressive modern thriller that makes an effort to parse the threats of a society and generation that, as networked and interlaced together as they may be, are on the cusp of being desperately, unhealthily disconnected.