Every generation has its angry young men, rebelling against the cultural conformity of the era. From James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Marlon Brando in The Wild One pushing back against the stifling conservatism of the Eisenhower age, to the various turn-of-the-century studies of disaffected adults stilted by middle-class life, these are snapshots of specific moments taken whilst they’re still unfolding – contemporaneous works that were already looking ahead to their future statuses as period pieces. Encapsulating a generational mood is near-impossible to perfect within the moment, and even with the advantage of a slight distance from the real-world events invoked within the narrative, Locust is lacking the insights needed to become the state-of-the-nation address it aspires to.

Set in 2019, against the backdrop of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, director KEFF’s film focuses on Taiwanese twenty-something Zhong-han (Wei-chen Liu), a mute young man who leads two very different lives. By day, he earns a living working at a family-run restaurant, whose two owners have developed such a close bond with him, the discovery that he’s neither a biological nor adopted son is ever so slightly jarring. He’s a sensitive soul, which makes his nighttime side hustle as a “debt collector” in a criminal organisation all the more ill-fitting. He’s tasked with helping carry out various brutal, elaborate schemes to get fast payouts from local business owners, eventually expanding their net to include rich kids and influencers through a broad misunderstanding of Robin Hood’s legacy.

You won’t win any prizes for guessing that  Zhong-han’s two worlds eventually overlap, and that this run-of-the-mill tale of criminal and political corruption is intended first and foremost as a metaphor for a country’s fears of creeping authoritarianism in its own backyard. Despite the cultural specificity, there is little here that isn’t retreading familiar ground from decades of better crime epics; that this story is designed as a unique allegory doesn’t make up for the fact that it’s relatively simple at face value, told in a way you’ve seen countless times before. There are some intermittently entertaining moments as we see the schemes carried out – Devin Pan’s performance as gang leader Kobe gives the movie its bursts of charisma, a character who leans into the theatricality of each scheme as if he’s performing for an audience, and not just the pour souls he’s swindling out of money.

I’m less sold on Liu’s lead performance, which others have commended for his ability to convey emotion through expression alone. For the most part, I found his performance every bit as passive as the character he’s portraying, a blank slate for the audience to project their own emotions onto, who is only ever as good as his scene partner in any given moment. Take his relationship with grocery store worker I-Ju (Rimong Ihwar), a romance which blossoms largely because he is, by his very nature, a good listener, effectively operating as an unpaid therapist who politely listens whilst showing few visible signs of actually hearing her. This is no fault of Ihwar’s performance, which adds personality to a character the film itself acknowledges is an archetype of a young woman who wants to run away and start a new life, at one point waxing lyrical about how much of herself she sees in the protagonist of hit anime Your Name. There are just very few moments in which the chemistry between the two is palpable, needing a minor obstacle – such as a group of young hoodlums harassing her on shift – in order for their flirtatious dynamic to properly come across.

The actor stretches credulity further as a conflicted gang member, a narrative strand even further defined by his passivity, approaching each scene as an emotional blank slate until the inevitable moment he belatedly decides to make a stand. If intended as a generational snapshot in the manner I read it, then it never feels more calculated than it does here, as a character lacking in distinctive characteristics finally attempts to step up and confront the systemic forces oppressing him. Ignore the specific cultural milieu in the background; this is a broadly written tale of generational angst written in a way that young viewers can easily insert themselves into, attempting to be meaningful to all viewers and far likely to prove meaningless to most.

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Written by Alistair Ryder

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