Having played TIFF and Fantastic Fest, Dead Talents Society is the latest from director John Hsu, and I’ve just seen his rad Taiwanese ghost horror comedy at Hawaii International Film Festival.
Hsu’s last feature was the great 2019 period horror film, Detention. Dead Talents Society is out from Sony, so you shouldn’t have an issue seeing it after its festival run, especially since the film is a lot of fun. You could look at the film, in part, as sort of a modern, All About Eve in the world of haunting. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In the afterlife, ghosts compete with each other on who can scare humans the most. However, the bigger prize is who can also be captured scaring people on video and posted to social media. Ghost legend Catherine is played by the excellent Sandrine Pinna (The Rookies, The Mutations); her former protégé Jessica (Ching-I Pai, Urban Horror, Miss Shampoo) constantly tries to upstage her, and does, many times.
There’s even a big ghost awards show, talk shows, and everything. There’s a social caste system, too with these ghosts, just as there is in human society, with the stars on whatever form of afterlife TV there is, and the small timers haunting places like public restrooms at playgrounds, ew. A ghost can’t just be dead in the world of Dead Talents Society, it must apply for a haunting license by way of a public display of spookiness, a ghostly talent show.
Enter The Rookie (Gingle Wang, Detention, Marry My Dead Body), who’s never referred to by a proper name, unless I missed it. The Rookie is a teenager or young adult, freshly killed in a car accident. The Rookie and her friend/sidekick, whose name I also never learned, visit The Rookie’s family’s home, where her prized certificate of merit disappears. Soon after, The Rookie glitches, her visual form glitches out like a bad connection on an old CRT TV. They find out that in 30 days, she’ll disintegrate completely unless she obtains a haunting license.
So, The Rookie finds this talent show that decides who’s worthy of a license, and she fails miserably. However, there’s a talent agent in the audience, Makoto (Bo-lin Chen, Small & Mighty, Day Off). He works with fading ghost star Catherine, and it turns out that they need new talent, however bad, to train in order to keep their own haunting license and keep themselves relevant in the ghost-eat-ghost world of the afterlife.
Now we get an ’80s-style haunt-training montage! Eventually, The Rookie becomes great at the job, even if she succeeds by accident, in what’s a terrific and gory sequence and setpiece, that also manages to be funny. I’d rather not give it away, but it’s… shocking in the best way. We also find out the sweet origins of Makoto, a sort of boyish popstar who died by a stage accident in 1992 as he was about to catch a big break.
The film soon descends into a flurry of competition between rival Jessica and her ghost team against Catherine, Makoto, and The Rookie. They attempt to scare nonbelieving influencers and there’s a whole running commentary about this that gets tiresome. This style of filming and rapid-fire editing morphs into an overload of social media and competition show that overstayed its welcome for me, but perhaps the onslaught is exactly the point. Still, I felt the film lost some potency in this section, and I could have done with several minutes of this portion of the film, as a few minutes of this social hyperactivity was more than enough.
As fun and slapstick as Dead Talents Society manages to be, there’s also a message here: if you’re not seen, if you don’t have enough followers, if you do not constantly feed the social media machine, you’re nothing. You’re no one, you disappear. And that’s a sick truth of the real world these days; if you’re out there and not constantly performing, you’re not likely to have staying power, either on social media, or in the influencer or entertainment world. You do not exist.
The film is aware of this, and so The Rookie character tosses away her license, disgusted by the spectacle. Thankfully, Dead Talent Society returns to form and seems to tell us that we are enough, without having to perform and be special 24/7, a very human ending. I recommend Dead Talents Society for a ghostly good time.