A paranoid delusion plays out ― or does it? ― in Nina Wu, a psychodrama told at the speed of a leisurely walk through your neighborhood park. There is also a mystery at the center of cowriter/director Midi Z’s film: Beyond whether what is being experienced by the protagonist is really occurring, what inspires this hallucinatory final act, wherein the line between reality and fiction is blurred and either Nina (Wu Ke-Xi, who also cowrote the screenplay) begins to experience things as the movie character within this story or that movie character begins to take on the qualities of the actor performing it? More importantly, is there a reason to care about solving that mystery when we get to the answer?
It might seem cruel, considering that the answer is the story we have heard far too many times in recent years (the one about a secretive audition behind closed doors and for a sleazy male producer with some substances to imbibe or ingest), but that sole reason to sympathize with Nina’s story comes far too late and much too long after the thumb-twirling psychosis of the middle and final acts. Those stretches introduce and discard so many conflicts that ultimately do not seem to matter that it feels like Z and Wu are simply trying to evade resolving the central mystery until it runs out of story to tell. When it does, which is long before the concluding sequence, that paranoid delusion goes on autopilot.
The best part of Nina’s story is easily the opening act, in which we learn of her specific struggle to pursue an acting career. So far, she has only performed as an extra in various short films and commercials, as well as one major blockbuster and a few independent productions. Her big break comes with the announcement of a major Taiwanese production. The sticking point for Nina is that the role will require full-frontal nudity in an extended and explicit sex scene. On top of that, the director (Shih Ming-Shuai) is a tyrant, giving contradictory direction to and sometimes physically abusing Nina while favoring the male costars, even if they make a mistake during shooting that eclipses her own minor flubs.
On top of this strain, her father (Cheng Ping-Chun), who owns a factory, is forced to declare bankruptcy and liquidate his company after taking on a troublesome client, and that stress causes her mother (Wang Chuan) to suffer a minor heart attack. Elsewhere, her childhood friend Kiki (Vivian Sung), who may have been something more at one point in their relationship, has returned upon hearing of the medical event, and Nina, who never loved anyone else like she loved Kiki, has sudden plans to rekindle the romantic part of that union. And as icing on the cake, Nina believes that another actor (Hsia Yu-Chiao) vying for the part in the movie is obsessed with and stalking her.
In case it is unclear by now, it seems that, to the screenwriters, the most important thread in the previous paragraph involves the stalker, especially in the way she ties in to the overall story of a troubled woman’s dwindling attachment to reality. In front of the camera, Wu’s performance is notable for how the actor communicates the shift from troubled to assaulted by the features of her surroundings. The problem (and it is a fatal one) is that Z’s treatment of Nina’s story behind the camera does not reflect the urgency of her situation until the final 10 minutes or so, when those surrounding features begin to fracture. Instead, the director lumbers through her predicament.
Then, of course, the filmmakers reach that concluding sequence, which calls the reality of everything past a certain point into question and, in the process, undermines everything that was so urgent until that point. If the resolution to the central mystery is both obvious and obviously devastating, the rest of the story feels like an extended act of purposeful evasion. Nina Wu is both a dire warning and a fable about the price of fame, but it doesn’t have the courage of its convictions beyond being a paper-thin psychodrama that likes to jerk its audience around. It also really likes putting its protagonist through the ringer. That says something, I suppose, and it isn’t pretty.
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