Director – Chiang Wei-liang – 2024 – Taiwan, Singapore, France – Cert. 15 – 128m
****1/2
An immigrant caregiver is caught between the demands of his exhausted, needy clients on the one hand and his profit-oriented gangster taskmasters on the other – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 23rd
This gets straight in there with a taboo-breaking shot of a human bottom covered in excrement, something familiar to anyone who has worked as a carer for an incontinent person but a bit of a shock to the rest of us. A hand bearing a cloth comes into shot and wipes the excrement off. When we eventually see the carer’s head, he is wearing earphones as he does the work. All his male client is doing is wordlessly moaning. We watch the carer lift the man, reassuring him, and deposit him in an offscreen chair. An elderly woman dozes on the sofa. He wipes her brow with a fresh towel. She takes it from him and wipes her face. He tells her he’s fed and bathed Hui (i.e. the son, played by Kuo Shu-wei who has cerebral palsy).
The carer goes outside in the rain. In the cab of his truck, his boss asks, what the hell took you so long? He hands over the money when asked. The small truck drives in the dark to what appears to be a small farm, with a chained gate. Inside, they get into an argument about people not having had their wages for over two months. Indri has collapsed. They take her inside and warm her with driers.
How bad is it?, the man asks the boss. The boss simply drives off.
Thus begins this extraordinary character study of a Thai immigrant to Taiwan working illegally as a caregiver in one of the country’s mountainous regions. I’m cheating a little writing that, because the geographical specifics are hard to establish from the film itself, which is constructed using long, intimate, locked-off takes which allow the camera to dispassionately observe the actors’ performances. Much of what goes on does so in darkened interiors or nighttime exteriors skilfully lit by cinematographer Michaël Capron (Blue is the Warmest Colour, Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013) so that you can see everything you need to. (I’ve lost count of the number of irritating movies that take place in darkness or at night, where the cinematographer fails to achieve this).
The carer we meet in the opening scene, the main protagonist, is Oom (Wanlop Rungkumjad) and his client is Hui’s mother Mei (Lu Yi-ching) – or, in subtitled Mandarin vernacular, Auntie Mei. The mother and son are good people, but she is old and ailing while he is in need of constant attention, all of which is wearing Oom down. She is a good payer, though, so his immediate superior has no intention of losing her custom and pressurises Oom to stick with her and Hui.
That brings us to the other set of relationships in the film, relating to Oom’s precarious employment as an undocumented migrant. Immediately above him, in charge of the Dormitory where he and other migrants are illegally housed, is his boss Hsing (Daniel Hong), a gangster in a network that profits from exploiting migrant workers in the Taiwan’s black market care sector. Hsing in turn works for the even more ruthless Te (Akira Chen), mostly seen hanging out near the dance floor of his nightclub, often seated relaxing with several women.
The organised gang network extends much further, as indicated by a later sequence where Hsing’s drives Oom as part of a convoy of half a dozen or so trucks and dormobiles to a (railway?) station exterior to pick up unwary foreign tourists, an experience which nearly turns disastrous for Oom when the police turn up to catch illegal immigrants and traffickers. When he makes it back to the truck and evades a pursuing cop’s clutches, he gets a pat on the back from the delighted Hsing who is driving, and the pair later dance breathlessly on Te’s dance floor.
If this suggests that everything is rosy between Hsing and Oom, that impression is swiftly corrected in a scene where Oom has gone against Hsing’s will and Hsing beats him up, kicking him when he’s down. This relates to the departure of Mhai (Achtara Suwan), a fellow worker who’s not been at the dorm as long as Oom and is the ringleader of the current demands for payment.
Whilst those above Oom in the pecking order are gangsters, those below or alongside him are fellow migrants. One (who we never actually see but only hear of when Oom and Mhai are talking) is a man who, despite Oom’s warning that he wouldn’t find anywhere better than their current dorm, has gone further up the mountain in search of a better work opportunity, and hasn’t been seen since. Early on, when Oom returns with Hsing in his truck to the dorm, the pair are confronted by a group of eight of so workers verbally protesting that they haven’t yet been paid; most of them are subsequently herded into a room behind the dance floor at Te’s nightclub and vanish from the narrative which is peppered with words like “slaughterhouse” suggesting that they have come to a sticky end.
Hsing’s star worker Indri, meanwhile, has fallen sick, and can barely move. Later, when Oom makes and brings her some hot food in a bowl, she is a lifeless corpse. After Oom has packed her meagre possessions into a plastic bag, he and Hsing carry her wrapped corpse and her bag of personal effects respectively through the hillside forest to dump them unceremoniously by a deserted shack. As Oom’s own troubles deepen, he will later return there to ask her spirit for advice. He clearly had great respect for her, not least since he now has to fill her former role as Hsing’s most trusted (if put upon) employee.
There is a constant hint of violence beyond the edges of the story as it unfolds in sounds and images before us. The nearest we come to it, beyond the sight of Hsing’s beating Oom up, is the scene of the concerned woman client insistently asking Te about the vanished Indri when she is offered Oom as replacement. Te, sitting in the truck with Hsing beside him, tries to placate her with, “you have nothing to worry about,” going on to point out that getting a migrant worker to do all that work is a pretty good deal, so “she ought to know her fucking place!”
Packs of or lone mongrels wander into and out of shot at various points in the narrative, with a lone one used as the closing image of the whole, as if to imply a being or beings so out of place that they simply don’t fit in with everything going on socially around them, a highly effective and thought-provoking image.
The moral centre of the drama, however, is to be found in Oom’s work caring for Hui and his increasingly weakening mother. All three performances are never less than compelling to watch. When Oom accompanies Mei as she takes Hui to a Christian church-run care home where she hopes he’ll move in, Hui struggles to get the words out from his wheelchair: “ma… I don’t want… I don’t want… I want to go home… I want to go.” As she tries to comfort him, he pulls pathetically on her coat sleeves.
This sets us up for the final scenario in which when Mei is unable to care for him, the desperate Hui crawls through their small house in search of attention and help. Oom, in attendance and wanting to do the best for the mother and son he possibly can, is forced to consider euthanasia as an option.
Despite parts where you wish the film could be a little clearer at supplying the audience with the various names of its characters, or the geography or infrastructure within which events take place, this is nevertheless delivered with a rare cinematic rigour – the producers include legendary Taiwanese director Hou Hsaio-Hsien (Millennium Mambo, 2001) and his sometime editor Liao Ching-sung, who between them clearly saw something in him. Aesthetically, with its locked off camera and vision of humans trapped in exploitation, it feels not a million miles away from and possesses a similar emotional intensity to parts of Small Things Like These (Tim Mielants, 2024), while its metaphor of wandering dogs recalls movies as diverse as Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004) and Cadejo Blanco (Justin Lerner, 2021).
Overall, despite its bleak, often claustrophobic vision of a predatory social system in which everyone is pressured to prey on those further down the social chain, it aspires to show put upon human beings exhibiting kindness and grace to those in need of their help. Altogether, a remarkable piece of work – and not likely to be in UK cinemas very long, so I’d recommend you track it down this week while it can be seen here.
Mongrel is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, May 23rd.
Trailer: