The opening scene, with a close-up of a part of a disabled person's body being cleaned, immediately captures attention and instantly focuses the gaze on the difficult and gruesome theme of the film.

The story follows Oom, a Thai man without documents, who works as a caregiver for an elderly woman, Mei, with serious health problems, and her disabled son, Hui, who has cerebral palsy. He is a man who meticulously cares for his charges, extremely dedicated to the care and delicacy required in handling others' bodies.

One day, Hui's mother asks him to help her son die, but the Thai caregiver does not accept the request. He is not ready to commit such an act and does not know how to respond to this desperate plea.

Taiwan, mountainous area: Hsing, Oom's boss, manages the lives of refugees from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam, whose documents and cash are confiscated to ensure they do not cause problems and accept any working and payment conditions.

They live in a huge shack, a dormitory, and complain about not being paid for a long time. After all, the boss needs to resolve his severe debt situation, while Oom tries to manage this situation, believing that Hsing will eventually pay them as promised.

Even the local gangster, Brother Te, follows orders from above that cannot be disobeyed.

Everything takes place in poor, cramped, claustrophobic environments, with little light, damp, and without a horizon: the mood of the healthcare workers reflects this condition, as does that of the people they care for.

Hsing's attitude is relentless, cruel, and fierce even towards Oom, whom he considers his trusted man. When Oom takes the independent initiative to save a charge's life, Hsing reacts with extreme violence.

Among the bodies to be cared for are also those to be concealed and those to be subjected to exploitation and oppression.

Only Oom always maintains his humanity, his talent for attentiveness and care for others' suffering, even when he is forced to act against his will. He washes his charges, cooks their dinner, trains, and supervises his colleagues even when they act more or less appropriately, providing pleasure to bodies exposed to suffering.

Some scenes in the film depict situations at the limit of the most realistic and harsh crudeness, suffocating and oppressive, fully realizing the project and meaning that the film aims to represent programmatically.

The lullabies, laments, music, noises, and sound disturbances confirm this painful and narrow narrative line, never, however, pathetic or moving.

Everything is essential, both in expressions and gestures, in words and movements: no life here has value, neutrality reigns, and ethics would be pathetic.

Only Oom's final and definitive choice about his own life and others' portrays him with an identity that is constructed, elaborated, conquered, and renewed compared to the initially rejected request now fulfilled.

Perhaps he is the bastard of the title, reflected in the four-legged creature without a limb, as the end credits approach the end of the story: something ambiguous remains in his character, in his change that becomes an inevitable existential transformation.

Singaporean director Chiang Wei Liang has always dealt with the migration of Southeast Asian workers, and together with You Qiao Yin, has continued his surprising and extremely convincing narrative journey both artistically and content-wise. The use of silence and long voyeuristic shots compel attention and gaze on the ineffable, the unspeakable, the unrepresentable, and therefore inevitable. Total concentration is required; no subtractions or distractions are allowed.

Everything is so strong, invasive, and relentless that it does not justify the possibility of looking away or allowing mechanisms of removal.

This film is an examination that subjects others' bodies to suffering and our own body to resistance in the face of insignificance and senselessness.

It is the representation of the most extreme existential nihilism; of the meaning of pain and lies while the death rattle accompanies the embrace of those who gave you life, betrayed by denying itself: that death which is the simple decay of the body, and that life devoid of any dignity, purifiable only through its liberating conclusion.

27-Jun-2024 by Beatrice