There’s a lot going on in this film, a large cast of characters, a popular online game that connects many of them, a webcomic inspired by the game, a seemingly random shooting spree in a night market. I bewildered at first as what it is trying to achieve. If it’s just about frustrated youth boiling over and killing people, the large cast seems superfluous. Then the film switches modes and makes it obvious that its real theme is that anyone can flip and go crazy under the right circumstances. I admit that this is kind of clever but it took too long to make its point and it’s not a terribly well made film anyway.

The centerpiece is the shooting spree that ends with one person dead and multiple people injured. The rest of the film elaborates on the motivations of the shooter and the lives of the people who were affected. The shooter is Zhang Wen, a troubled boy whose father is a rich public figure. His father wants him to go overseas to study but he prefers to stay in Taiwan. His best friend is Ah Xing, with whom he collaborates on the webcomic “Angry Zero”. When he finishes building an air gun, he plays around with it and considers using it to kill a dog who he feels is suffering from being caged by its owner. The victim is Xiao Sheng, a civil servant who is engaged in social work in an impoverished neighborhood. He was engaged to Vita, a marketing executive involved in the promotion of the online game everyone seems to be playing. In his private life Xiao Sheng is also a popular video streamer who plays this game. Then there is Linlin, a high school girl who lives in that same poor area and struggles with her alcoholic mother. She too plays in that game and receives virtual goods from Xiao Sheng in exchange for nude photos. There are other characters too but this is already quite a cast and the point is to show how they are all connected together in unexpected ways.

The number of characters whose stories need to be told and the fact that some have online personas very different from their real life ones make this film quite a chore to digest. The online game that connects many of them places the events in the context of our modern digital world and allows for some nice thematic flourishes, such as a bridge that allows for players to move on to the next world and reset their characters. However it is also misleading as it suggests that there is something more mysterious going on when really Zhang Wen’s story is the familiar one of a boy who feels helpless against the expectations of an overbearing father and has trouble articulating what it is he really wants. That the plot then has Ah Xing go on to seek some kind of justice or at least closure for Zhang Wen is a further distraction even if it ties back to the comic they work on together. The only interesting aspect is the message is that everyone is just one bad day away from a complete break down that makes them violently lash out, as in the comic. This is not an altogether original idea but this film was inspired by real such attacks in Taiwan and there is some merit in framing them in this way to make the audience see things from the perspective of the attacker.

The film is however dragged down by the poor acting of its performers. The use of video games and webcomics as cultural references already drive it in an edgy direction but the inability of the director Lou Yi-an to coax naturalistic performances out of the cast makes it downright cringey. Wanting to shoot a dog to free it from captivity is insane and what Zhang Wen needs is therapy, not escape from an overbearing father. The entire subplot about Ah Xing being gay and being willing to go to extreme lengths for the sake of his friend is a weird and distracting escalation. Again and again, the director wants to show that anyone can be driven to violence under the right circumstances with the the videogame reference and even the name Asura suggesting that it is a matter of fate. It’s a very eastern way of making sense of the shock and incomprehension when confronted with these seemingly random acts of violence. Unfortunately the execution is muddled and worse, the way the film embraces the edginess of the characters and invites us to sympathize with their angst also glorifies the violence.

I think of this as a very hip Taiwanese film, in tune with current events and a fast-changing society. But as with so many of these young Taiwanese filmmakers, the mindset remains immature and the approach favors complexity over sophistication. In this film, Zhang Wen when asked about what he wants and why he did it, continually fails to articulate his thoughts. That makes sense for a confused young man, but I’m not convinced that it’s not the director himself who is inarticulate.