There is a dark, spectral quality to this compassionate film about Southeast Asian migrant workers in rural Taiwan. At the centre of this story is Oom, played with quiet stoicism by Wanlop Rungkumjad, who is one of many Thai, Cambodian and Myanmar nationals who have entered Taiwan illegally to find care work in its remote mountainous regions.
The group of mainly Thai migrant workers we follow have the bad fortune of working for Hsing, a capricious boss who promises a pay day that never comes. Oom slowly becomes Hsing’s right-hand man which invariably strains solidarity among the migrants. An uncomfortable scene shows Hsing gift Oom a pair of flashy earphones right after telling his employees they aren’t getting paid today – again. The earphones light up with a garish red flash during their gloomy car ride, one of many instances where a flicker of artificial light adds a strange, spectral quality to the muted surroundings.
When Oom’s friends, Mei and Mhai, suggest going further up the mountain to find work, Oom needs to decide if he thinks staying will eventually pay off or drag him into the criminal underworld his boss is wrapped up in. When he is asked to look after Hui, a handicapped young man (pictured right) whom Oom cares for with great kindness, he is confronted with another, greater dilemma.
The Taiwanese New Wave auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien is credited as executive producer and it is easy to see why he was drawn to the source material, his early films were similarly portraits of rural life rendered with careful detail. With Mongrel Chiang channels that New Wave desire to depict the realities of national life, but also draws attention to the starkly different geopolitical times we live in today compared with those early Eighties films from Hsien. This a harsher world shaped by extreme inequality and precarious migrant experiences, it would be an understatement to say that the pastoral idyll of Hsien’s 1983 Green, Green Grass of Home, feels like an alien world.
This is at times an unbearably bleak watch. Especially in the film's final act which plays out like a Bressonian march to the end. Chiang makes us bear witness to the intimacies of care work and the painful realities of exploitation involving spirals of debt and deception, based on what Chiang observed while living among these migrant communities. Shooting on location in Taiwan’s remote regions where the nights are pitch-black and the rain pours as if intent on covering every inch of the world in grey, adds to the film's documentary-like realism. Along with the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio and immersive sound design, Mongrel’s oppressive atmosphere can feel like being restrained under a damp weighted blanket.
But this is a film of great compassion and empathy, even though it doesn't rewards its audience with a parting dose of optimism. When a warm yellow light peeks into the bedroom towards the end, it is simply from a cheap electric heater. There is light in the darkness, Chiang seems to say, but it won't always come from something as sentimental as a ray of sunshine.
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