TERRORIZER (K’UNG-PU FEN-TZU) Milestones

A blocked novelist (Cora Miao) contemplates giving up writing and returning to the 9-to-5 work force. Her husband, a doctor, snitches on a colleague in order to get a promotion at work.

Meanwhile, a photographer becomes increasingly obsessed with the young woman he sees fleeing from a police raid. These are the characters – all of them linked by a single, randomly placed phone call – who populate Edward Yang’s masterful third feature. Dazzling in its narrative complexity, THE TERRORIZERs, like many of Yang’s films, a study of choices made and roads not taken, and of the myriad ways in which we literally and figuratively seal ourselves off from meaningful human contact until we are primed to explode.

As Yang himself noted of the film, “There may not be Baader-Meinhof gangs in this part of the world, but the bombs we plant in each other are ticking away.”