Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Soul’ on Netflix, a Taiwanese Potboiler Blending Elements of Horror, Sci-fi, Mystery and Melodrama

Please note the definite article: The Soul (Ji hun) is a Taiwanese film on Netflix, and not Soul, the animated Oscar nominee from Pixar you can see on Disney+. Filmmaker Cheng Wei Hao liberally stirs elements from science fiction, crime procedurals, mystery, horror and melodrama into this dense story about a cancer-stricken prosecutor investigating the murder of a prominent business tycoon. Now let’s see if the director can hold all this stuff together.

THE SOUL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Taipei, 2032. The cops arrive at the Wang mansion. Mr. Wang (Samuel K) is dead on the floor, his skull caved in, blood everywhere. His wife, Li Yan (Sun Anke), is unconscious beside him, holding a strange brass instrument she maybe used to bludgeon him. His son, Tian-You (Lin Hui Min), fled the scene. Tian-You’s mother, Su-Chen (Zhang Baijia), was long neglected by Mr. Wang, and she killed herself a year prior. Mr. Wang was terminally ill with brain cancer, and left all the assets and control of his multi-billion-dollar corporation to Li Yen and the company’s CEO, Dr. Wan (Christopher Ming-Shun Lee). Complicating already complicated matters, the crime scene is littered with odd, mystical-occult clues, including a sigil carved into the door and the scent of burning belladonna (which some may know as deadly nightshade).

Of course, the scene is not as it seems, and not just anyone can piece together a coherent narrative from the tangle of evidence. Enter prosecutor Liang Wen-Chao (Chang Chen), who we meet in the hospital. His wife and co-worker, A-Bao (Ning Chang), is pregnant, but Liang may not live to see the child be born. His cancer has returned, and he faces intensive treatment, to try to keep the cancerous cells from reaching his brain. He worries that he’ll leave his family broke and destitute, and therefore wants to keep working. So he convinces his boss at the Taipei police department that he should investigate the Wang murder, and gamely tackles the high-profile case.

So: Why would anyone kill Wang when he was already so close to death? What’s this mystical woo-woo that Tian-You was practicing — mystical woo-woo he learned from Su-Chen, who cursed Wang before her suicide? Is Wang’s subsequent illness and his company’s financial struggles a coincidence, or a product of Su-Chen’s curse? Why did Wang put security cameras in his new wife Li Yan’s room, which capture her having strange convulsions as if she’s possessed? How does the Wang Corp.’s development of a high-tech experimental cancer treatment tie into this? Could this treatment maybe help Liang, and present an ethical conundrum? SO MANY QUESTIONS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Wei Hao sometimes indulges David Fincherisms in his chilly depiction of Taipei and the details of the detective story (think The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Visually, its tech-of-the-future components bring to mind Minority Report and the Blade Runners. And the melancholy sci-fi vibe is reminiscent of Mark Romanek’s underrated Never Let Me Go.

Performance Worth Watching: Chang Chen and Ning Chang are the emotional core of the film, struggling to find their footing at the intersection of science- and law-based reason and the ethereal stuff of the soul and supernatural.

Memorable Dialogue: A-Bao succinctly sums up what’s going on at Wang Corp: “Damn, this is basically modern necromancy.”

Sex and Skin: Brief female full-frontal.

Our Take: The Soul is a dark, dense film that’ll reward attentive viewers and turn away those looking for light entertainment. It frequently ruminates on the edge of the high, high cliff of mortality, dances on the fringe of bleakness, slogs through melancholy swamps. But despite its subtly dystopian view of the future and the omnipresence of death in its fully realized reality, it’s not an endeavor wholly free of hope. It’s an ambitious picture.

That, and Wei Hao stacks up twists like crazy, launching the first just when the narrative might begin to sag — it’s a well-paced two-hour-plus movie, something of a rarity — and transitions from feasible to far-fetched gradually enough for us to stay on board when things get a bit wacky. The occultish horror content is underdeveloped and mostly goes nowhere, and the final-act melodrama can be a little oppressive, but we remain involved as Wei Hao takes us through a few crazy plot corridors laced with compelling moral provocations. One senses that it could’ve gone deeper into its neo-quasi-ethical-scientific content (I’m being somewhat vague here on purpose) and further develop its subtext so it’s less plot-driven, but as it stands, The Soul is pretty good stuff.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Just because The Soul is buried in Netflix’s content menus doesn’t mean it’s not worth watching. Some of its influences are prevalent, but Wei Hao pushes past them with enough drive to create a movie that’s tantalizingly close to being its own original thing. It’s the work of a filmmaker with vision.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Soul on Netflix