Terrorizers

Yang’s most narratively intricate and formally audacious film opens with an early-morning police shootout in which a woman (known only as “the white chick”) is seen fleeing the scene through the lens of a young amateur photographer. Elsewhere in the city, blocked novelist Chou (Wayne Wang muse Cora Miao) unsuccessfully tries to elicit sympathy from her frosty husband, a lab technician whose sense of self-worth hinges on being chosen for an important promotion. Gradually, these enigmatic characters emerge in sharper relief—and converge in a series of dazzling and unexpected ways—while the line between reality and fiction blurs in the pages of Chou’s latest story. A complexly layered, self-reflexive puzzle film (like something between Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation), Terrorizers is at once Yang’s ultimate statement on the isolation of modern living and a road map through his own formidable creative process. 2K restoration courtesy of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute.