Dead Talents Society

In the spirit of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, but set in a community of East Asian frighteners, Dead Talents Society invites you to peer beyond the veil into the secret netherworld of professional spectres as they compete in terrorizing the living to ensure their liminal lifestyle.

You see, souls have a finite shelf life after death, and must regularly spook up the mortal realm as a curse or urban legend in order to secure a “haunter’s license,” a renewable reprieve from total oblivion. While such macabre machinations are no sweat for those who lived boldly in life, for the meeker variety of newly dead, it promises a second death sentence.

Co-writer and director John Hsu, who dominated the Taiwanese box office with his 2019 survival horror videogame adaptation Detention, swaps that film’s provocative scares for this gleefully silly, supernatural satire as he stylishly hones in on the afterlife of a shy, recently deceased teen (Gingle Wang) who learns that she has only 30 days left to scare someone.

At the behest of a starry-eyed “ghost” talent agent (Bo-Lin Chen) sympathetic to her desperation to be seen, the rookie falls in with a troupe of misfit haunters, led by a phantom diva (Sandrine Pinna) determined to revitalize her own fading career. Together, they scheme for screams, and with so much hysterical showmanship and winning sincerity, their blood-curdling feats will not only split an audience’s sides, but also inspire a happy tear or two.

PETER KUPLOWSKY

Content advisory: themes of self-harm and suicide; accident trauma, horror