Suo Jiang
2024 · 16m · Taiwan
Directed by Lin Chien Yu
Genres: drama, mystery, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A taciturn Taipei locksmith going through a divorce drifts through the city in a dreamlike haze, becoming fixated on a mysterious blue door.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a divorce-via-locksmith metaphor that could've been insufferable, but Lin Chien Yu buries the obvious so deep in Taipei's texture and that obsessive blue door that you forget to roll your eyes—until you realize the film has made you *feel* something you didn't consent to.
A composed study in emotional geography that inherits from Wong Kar-wai's formal restraint and the slow-cinema lineage; the film's refusal to explain the blue door is a curatorial choice that demands the viewer complete the composition, which is how you know the craft is thinking.
The decision to let the locksmith's profession *become* the film's emotional language—each key, each lock, each threshold—rather than just naming the metaphor, is the move that turns sixteen minutes into something that feels excavated rather than written.
Reviews
I am not especially good at the elevator-pitch school of film description — the “X crossed with Y” formulation — but fortunately a Letterboxd user has done the work for me: Suo Jiang, the latest short from Taiwanese filmmaker Lin Chien Yu, is like Wong Kar-wai crossed with Haruki Murakami — a descri