Dead Talents Society is a spooky good time

After playing TIFF and Fantastic Fest, Society of Dead Talents is the latest from director John Hsu, and I just saw his radical Taiwanese ghost horror comedy at the Hawaii International Film Festival.

Hsu’s last feature film was the great 2019 horror film. arrest. Society of Dead Talents is from Sony, so you shouldn’t have a problem seeing it after the festival release, especially since the film is a lot of fun. One could partly view the film as a kind of modern, All about Eve in the world of hauntings. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In the afterlife, ghosts compete with each other to see who can scare people the most. The bigger prize, however, is whoever manages to scare people on video and post it on social media. The 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 outshine her, and he often does.

There’s even a big ghost awards show, talk shows and everything. These ghosts also have a social caste system, just like in human society, with the stars of all kinds of afterlife TV channels and the little contemporaries that haunt places like public toilets, playgrounds, ew. A ghost can’t just be dead in the world Society of Dead Talentsit must apply for a haunting license through a public display of spookiness, a spooky talent show.

Enter The Rookie (Gingle Wang, arrest, Marry my dead body), who is never mentioned by his real name unless I missed it. The rookie is a teenager or young adult who has just died in a car accident. The rookie and her friend/buddy, whose name I also never learned, visit the rookie’s family home, where her valuable certificate of merit disappears. Shortly thereafter, The Rookie experiences glitches, her visual form faltering like a bad connection on an old CRT television. They find out that if she doesn’t get a haunt license, she will completely disintegrate in 30 days.

So The Rookie finds this talent show that decides who deserves a license and fails miserably. However, there is a talent agent in the audience, Makoto (Bo-lin Chen, Small and powerful, Rest day). He teams up with fading ghost star Catherine, and it turns out they need new talent, however bad, to train in order to keep their own haunt license and stay relevant in the ghost-eaten spirit world of the afterlife.

Now we get an 80’s style haunted training montage! Ultimately, The Rookie becomes great at her job, even if she does so accidentally, in a great and gory sequence and set piece that also manages to be funny. I’d rather not give it away, but it’s…shocking in the best possible way. We also learn the sweet origins of Makoto, a sort of boyish pop star who died in a stage accident in 1992 just as he was on the verge of his big break.

The film soon descends into a frantic competition between rival Jessica and her ghost team against Catherine, Makoto and The Rookie. They’re trying to scare disbelieving influencers, and there’s a whole lot of commentary about it that’s getting tiresome. This style of filming and quick editing turns into an overload of social media and competition shows which is overkill for me, but perhaps the rush is exactly the point. Still, I felt that the film lost some steam in this section and I could have used several minutes of this part of the film as a few minutes of this social hyperactivity was more than enough.

As funny and slapstick as Society of Dead Talents succeeds, there is a message here too: Anyone who isn’t seen, who doesn’t have enough followers, who doesn’t constantly feed the social media machine is nothing. You are nobody, you disappear. And that’s a sick truth of the real world these days; If you’re out there and you’re not consistently performing, you probably don’t have staying power on social media, in the influencer or entertainment world. You don’t exist.

The film is aware of this and so the rookie character throws away his driver’s license in disgust at the spectacle. Thankfully, Dead Talent Society is back in form and seems to be telling us that we are enough without having to perform and be special 24/7, a very human ending. I recommend Society of Dead Talents for a spooky good time.