By James Marsh

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Lead cast: Shu Qi, Angelica Lee Sinje
Asian superstars Shu Qi and Angelica Lee Sinje headline The Resurrected, Netflix’s latest Taiwanese drama series, which premiered its first two episodes at the 30th Busan International Film Festival in South Korea on September 18, ahead of its October 9 release on the streamer.
Shu and Lee play a pair of desperate mothers who band together to stage a fantastical revenge plot after their daughters fall victim to an illegal telecoms scam operating in a shady corner of Southeast Asia.
Directed by Leste Chen Cheng-tao and Hsu Chao-jen, The Resurrected combines pressing social issues with outrageous supernatural horror, two of the most popular and ubiquitous genres in Taiwanese media right now.

A generous dose of melodrama is also added to the mix, as the narrative follows these two women in their struggle to process what happened to their children and the lengths to which they go to ensure justice is served.
In the fictional Asian city of Benkha, we are first introduced to Wang Hui-chun (Shu) and Chao Ching (Lee) at a remote temple, where they witness a young shaman goddess bringing a monkey back to life in front of a large crowd of worshippers.
Hui-chun asks for help on behalf of her teenage daughter, Jin Jin (Vivi Chen), who she says was tortured repeatedly and has been comatose for three years. She is refused help because her daughter is still alive.
Similarly, when Ching requests that her daughter, Hsin-yi (Caitlin Fang, American Girl), who died from her injuries, be brought back, the goddess also refuses, as Hsin-yi’s body has already been cremated.

Jumping to the present day, it is revealed that Hui-chun, Ching and a third woman, I-chen (Alyssa Chia Jing-wen), are the faces of a group of relatives of victims who have all suffered under the criminal exploits of Chang Shih-kai (Fu Meng-po), the leader of a major scam operation in the region.
After a lengthy battle in the courts, Shih-kai has been convicted and sentenced to death. For many of the families, this marks the end of a five-year battle, but Ching remains unsatisfied and convinces Hui-chun to go further.
Specifically, she plans to steal Shih-kai’s body, bring him back to life and subject him to the same horrors he inflicted on her little girl.
It is a truly preposterous premise, but played dead straight by accomplished performers, which inevitably lends the material a suggestion of dramatic authenticity.

This is supplemented by a screenplay that jumps back and forth in time to detail every stage of this ordeal. Valuable screen time is spent explaining how the girls got into this mess and how the tragedy has affected every facet of the families’ lives thereafter.
The calm yet resolute Ching works at an insurance firm recently exposed for selling dodgy policies to its customers and denying their claims. This has seen Ching labelled a scam artist herself and ostracised by the friends and relatives whom she enrolled as policyholders.
The more timid and fragile Hui-chun, meanwhile, has moved to Benkha full-time and taken a lousy job running a small convenience store so that she can hold vigil at her daughter’s bedside.
She is also saddled with a loathsome husband (Cheng Jen-shuo), who repeatedly urges Hui-chun to pull the plug on their daughter and cash out the funds she has raised online to have her daughter repatriated.

Among the other notable characters are Shih-kai’s formidable mother (Chung Hsin-ling) and elegant sister (Liu Chu-ping, The Chronicles of Libidoists), both of whom appear to be reaping the financial benefits of his criminal empire.
Thus far, I-chen, who also serves as legal counsel for the victims’ families, has remained on the periphery of the story, but is almost certain to become a more significant character, not least because she is played by Chia.
Similarly, popular Thai-German performer Patrick Nattawat Finkler is listed prominently in the show’s cast, but does not appear in the first two episodes.
At this stage, it is impossible to predict where the rest of The Resurrected is headed, or if it will do so coherently or convincingly. Shu and Lee are clearly committed to the material, and their contrasting characters add to the curious charm of their on-screen partnership.

The stage is set for a giddy concoction of horror and heartache, and it seems equally committed to exploring both.
One suspects that what we have witnessed so far – which sees the drama veer wildly from euthanising teenagers to reanimating monkeys – gives audiences just a taste of the genre-bending roller coaster still to come.
The Resurrected is streaming on Netflix.