Complete first draft for Sight & Sound.
An undocumented Thai migrant working illegally in Taiwan attempts to care for his ailing patients while dealing with growing discontent among his compatriots. His relationships with bosses and fellow workers suffer, and he attempts to find a better, kinder path forward despite the crushing nature of the forces surrounding him. Chiang Wei Liang and You Qiao Yin's Mongrel begins, in characteristically unsparing fashion, with a shot of a soiled rear end as a hand carefully wipes it with a towel. The latter belongs to Oum, an undocumented Thai migrant living a precarious life of illegal employment in Taiwan, in the middle of one of his shifts as an at-home nurse. After he finishes bathing and cooking for his patient, a mentally disabled and wheelchair-bound man named Hui, he climbs into the truck of his employer, Boss Hsing, to take the long drive into the mountains where he lives with his fellow Thai, Indonesian, Filipino, and Vietnamese workers. This back-and-forth journey typifies much of Mongrel's concerns, drawing undeniably genuine yet simplistic parallel lines of degradation that find Oum in the middle. On the one hand, he is given slightly preferential attention from Boss Hsing, who is under fire for his continual withholding of payment from the other workers, who in turn resent Oum's relatively elevated status. On the other, Oum is made to endure all sorts of suspicion and mistreatment—which only grows after he has to step in for an elderly nurse after she falls deathly ill—from his employers and clients, whose own infirmities compound the sense of oppressive gloom. Mongrel is at its most compelling when it breaks from the largely pro forma physical and emotional abuses it subjects its characters to, shedding the degradation for something more ambiguous. The scenes of Oum attempting to make peace between his workers and Boss Hsing, along with a later sequence in which he reluctantly agrees to help corral more non-Taiwanese visitors intent on joining the ranks, offer a watchful sense of tactics and complicated ebullience, respectively, which is often absent from the humdrum, humiliating tasks that Oum almost invariably must do otherwise. Chiang and You capture all this in handsome but dimly lit Academy ratio, relying on long takes that feel more beholden to a de rigueur idea of contemplative cinema than one that is fully in sync with the emotional rhythms of the film. Though the natural world asserts itself on occasion, most notably in a few downpours and crucial sojourns into the forest, these are abandoned far before the extended 25-minute coda, a nearly wordless procession of interiors that, instead of expanding the viewer's conception of what could happen, funnel it inexorably towards a single point. The film culminates with a thuddingly literal visualization of its central metaphor, offering an iota of hope that comes far too late.
