The Cinematheque

“Masterly … Yang reaches high, and his aim is true … Neither sociological essay nor soap opera, it’s an intensely cinematic movie, finding mystery, pity, and fear in every life it scans.”

Tony Rayns, Time Out

“There may not be Baader-Meinhof gangs in this part of the world,” Yang has said of his complex, highly controlled third feature. ​“But the bombs we plant in each other are ticking away.” A coolly intriguing thriller in the modernist tradition of European art cinema, The Terrorizers spins three separate storylines of urban alienation and betrayal from across the social spectrum, and then slowly, enigmatically converges them. A novelist, unhappy with her marriage, contemplates resuming an affair with an old lover. An amateur photographer records a police raid on a gang hideout. A delinquent teenage girl, on the lam from the law, makes a series of crank calls that turns people’s lives upside down. ​“A complexly layered, self-reflexive puzzle film (like something between Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation), The Terrorizers is at once Yang’s ultimate statement on the isolation of modern living and a road map through his own formidable creative process” (Film at Lincoln Center).

In Mandarin with English subtitles

Restored DCP courtesy of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute

“An enigmatic, upsetting movie—troubling in ways you may have difficulty putting your finger on, nagging at you days later, like a sore spot that’s hard to reach … Yang has an eye for framings that throb with implacable loss.”

Nick Pinkerton, Artforum