Somehow, a mentally disturbed 30-year-old man from Taipei finds himself waking up out of a coma in a hospital in a small coastal town in Thailand. A woman is at his bedside, calling him Assanee. But that's not his name. His name is Her Sue Yong. And besides, he can't speak Thai. He leaps from his bed and runs, and the nurses give chase. In Taiwan, he was a bedraggled, long-haired scavenger. He had a disfigured face. But in Thailand, the skin on his face is smooth and his hair is short. He's a clean-cut young man with a beautiful wife. And he has a job as a civil servant in a government office. His inability to speak Thai is no problem at work. Heck, there's even a deaf-mute on the staff. All Assanee has to do is wait for people to hand him forms, and he stamps them. Seems easy enough.
Acting
Kenji Wu's physical transformation between two radically different selves
Production
Jarring tonal shift between Taiwan's grime and Thailand's sterile normalcy
Direction
Four directors somehow create one coherent nightmare logic
Director
Lin Tsu Liang
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Four directors collaborated on this Taiwan-Thailand co-production, each reportedly handling different narrative threads — explaining the dreamlike discontinuity.
The film explores anxieties around Southeast Asian labor migration and the 'upgrade' fantasy of escaping to a 'better' national identity.
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