The Abandoned 
查無此心 「Chá wú cǐ xīn」
Release Date: 2023
Duration: 128 mins.
Director: Tseng Ying-ting
Writer: Tseng Ying-ting, Yang Yu-chien, Lin Pin-chun, Hsu Shih-hui (Screenplay),
Starring: Janine Chang (Wu Jie, producer), Ethan Juan (Lin You-sheng), Chen Wei-min, Chloe Xiang, Sajee Apiwong, Hsueh Shih-ling,
The Abandoned is a Taiwanese crime film produced by and starring Janine Chang. It successfully combines a police procedural/serial killer film with topics like illegal immigration and tragic love, a part that is well realised in many different aspects of the film.
“Love doesn’t need a reason.”
A serial killer is targeting female illegal immigrants in Taipei; an underclass living in the shadows of society, they only attract attention when their bodies wash up on riverbanks or wind up on butcher’s blocks minus various parts. Disposing of the bodies to avoid trouble with the police is a fixer named Lin You-sheng (Ethan Juan) whose girlfriend, a migrant worker, has gone missing. He becomes the prime suspect of detective Wu Jie (Janine Chang), who was recently widowed due to the suicide of her husband. She was saved from her own suicide attempt by the discovery of an immigrant’s body. What unfolds is a serial killer chase conducted by two broken-hearted individuals tied together by death.
While light on social critique, the immigrant angle allows the story to provide an interesting milieu for what is a conventional serial killer thriller. There is a dedication to showing some immigrant life, including the range of people from across Asia with a cacophony of different languages often on display. The cultural specificity found here allows for the rules of the serial killer genre to be played with. For example the victims don’t go to the police. They can’t. Their illegal status prevents that and allows the film to offer misdirection and plot twists as people avoid the law. As a result, all of this allows the film fresh takes on familiar material, genre beats, aesthetics, and archetypes of a serial killer film. Yes, this almost matches David Fincher’s Seven (1995) for veteran/rookie cop pairing, constant rainfall and darkness and macabre body horror but it is not as all-encompassing scummy or bleak due to a ray of optimism provided by a certain emotion.
Living up to its title, Tseng Ying-ting’s film is full of those who have been abandoned – from losers in love, to the immigrants that hide in the shadows of society, and the bodies that wind up in morgues. The most important emotion, that ray of light, is love and it provides good motivation for Wu and Lin and the killer. It also provides absorbing drama in a redemptive path for the lead characters. Wu Jie’s attempts to keep the past alive are moving to see, especially in the way they help her mourn, while Lin becomes an unpredictable character to follow. These elements allow the police procedural parts some humanity and lend the film further originality that elevates it from another Seven-like.
What impresses most is the way that the theme/motif of love is relayed consistently through the film, starting from its opening to Only You by The Flying Pickets to the killer’s treatment of the bodies – exsanguination via the vena amoris, removal of the heart and ring finger – to imagery pulled from photographs, dreams, the use of a gun and a certain car with a bullet hole, dialogue about motivation and heartache between the family and lovers left behind pining for the victims.
Ultimately, while predictable, the deployment of love and the graceful fitting together of many visual and aural motifs that reinforce the theme really enhances the film. The added benefit of its milieu and the fact that it always looks and sounds great makes this an easy crime film to watch, especially as it does not lean into the grand guignol aspects of the serial killer genre.
The Abandoned was screened on Wednesday, July 26th, 21:00 at the Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center with an intro and Q&A with director Tseng Ying-ting.