Cinema Escapist

Suffocating Love is a clumsy film, whose technical merits are the only thing that prevent it from being a complete trainwreck. 

The protagonist, an unnamed office worker, finds himself drawn into a relationship with the reclusive Pai Chia-chi after meeting her through a book exchange group. The protagonist is drawn to Chia-chi’s seeming idealism after she decides that for her first date, they should hand out environmental fliers, but finds himself making compromises to be with her. This includes swearing off premarital sex, seeing as she is Christian, swearing off meat, seeing as she is vegetarian, and consenting to her controlling nature. Though the two quickly move in together, Chia-chi checks his phone, goes through his receipts, and controls what the two do and eat. 

But after encountering high school flame Lin Ai-hsuan, the protagonist gradually is drawn into an affair with her, eventually finding Chia-chi’s controlling nature to be too much. This occurs even as Ai-hsuan is herself in a long-term relationship. Ai-hsuan seems to offer what Chia-chi cannot, in that she is not so controlling, and also provides physical affection. 

All this would be par for the course, when it comes to film about affairs. But Suffocating Love has nothing like, say, the artistry of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. 

Namely, the protagonist falling for Chia-chi and making a series of compromises for her comes off as stilted and scripted. Even if the movie attempts to frame Chia-chi’s controlling nature as a quirky and cute character trait, it does a poor job on selling the premise of why the protagonist proves so willing to move into the apartment of someone he has just met out of a sudden infatuation, in spite of the many red flags. 

Some aspects of the movie’s poorly thought-out plot also prove odd, such as why the protagonist never seems to question why Chia-chi does not seem to work but is apparently wealthy enough to own an apartment. The realism of the plot barely hangs together, undercutting not only the depiction of romance but most other aspects of the movie. 

It is in the second half of the movie, however, that the film enters truly bizarre territory, with a sudden plot twist that is probably meant to surprise viewers but which is largely unsuccessful. This is because plot threads and character development from the first half of the film simply do not carry into the second half, with half of the movie’s cast suddenly dropping out of the picture and never reappearing. Efforts to build intrigue in the second half of the movie, in what is an attempt at a tonal shift, also simply do not work. 

More than that, however, the film’s second half lays bare the misogynistic underpinnings of its story, with women simply viewed as interchangeable and replaceable sex objects. Ultimately, this cannot help but leave a bad taste. 

Suffocating Love is only redeemable in any way on the basis of its technical merits, in that the movie was shot on an iPhone. This proves similar to director Liao Ming-yi’s previous film, his debut feature IWeirDo, which features the same main actors as Suffocating Love, and was also shot on an iPhone. But Suffocating Love is probably best passed over, as one ultimately comes away feeling that one has wasted one’s time. 

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Suffocating Love (Chinese: 愛的噩夢)—Taiwan. Dialog in Mandarin Chinese. Directed by Liao Ming-yi. First released Jul 12, 2024. Running time 1hr 42min. Starring Austin Lin, Nikki Hsieh, Chloe Xiang.