An illuminating, musical embrace for the ages.

The humor and ennui that Tsai's vision of dystopia evokes is both unique and compelling.

Cheerfully postulates the end of the world as an invitingly loony escapade.

An epidemic hits Taiwan, people who suffered from the disease become cockroach like in terms of their behaviour. A plumber created a hole in a man's apartment and the man and his neighbour began to suffer from the delusions and hallucinations of the effect of the disease. The hole represented the depression in a socially planned urban environment, everyone fills it with different methods. The hole is also a musical that juxtaposed the depression with cheerful tunes.

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang, "The Hole" reminds me of a story a friend told me about how in California people who would normally keep to themselves would work together to repair a wall after an earthquake, so they never had to speak to each other again. In this movie, there is an epidemic that causes people to act like cockroaches. Most of the population has been evacuated to quarantine camps but a few hardy souls stay behind. One of them(Yang Kuei-Mei) has her beauty treatment interrupted by dust from a hole in the ceiling that was not there before. Strangely enough, this does not lead to an increased amount of interaction with her upstairs neighbor(Lee Kang-sheng) who runs a store. Full of millenial angst, "The Hole" works in contrast to the director's "The Wayward Cloud" where there is a persistant drought. Here, it never stops raining and the infrastructure is collapsing. So, the musical numbers are a necessary place for the characters to escape into.