Oh woe is me, for how much I wanted to like this! I used to really enjoy Adult Swim Infomercials and mild analog horror-type adjacent content, and now I'm starting to wonder if my tastes have just grown out of it.

I believe the biggest flaw was the amount of self awareness that the film seems to have. And it's difficult because there's a very fine line between an almost satirical and embarrassingly millennial-like state of humor. I can encompass the concept in my mind but I'm having so much trouble properly articulating. Maybe I'll append this in the near future if I can explain it a bit better.

It's difficult to write a good film about student-teacher conflict in a prestigious school. I get it. But it really seems as though the director felt a tad too overambitious to cram every possible issue he could think to create tension that it ended up diluting the core of it all. Each character felt so flimsy; the stereotypical AuDHD kid representation completely outdated. And especially in such a high-stress environment in a country like Taiwan (which honestly feels out of place to begin with), the bullying scenes were almost comically surreal.

Is there a point to highlighting such problems if it's executed so poorly? As someone who's witnessed countless peers in her youth deal with mental health issues and abuse study drugs, I came out of this screening feeling like this all was just a joke. I don't know. Mostly I'm just confused about why this Hong Kongese director decided to water down the already miserable pool of present-day Taiwanese cinema.

Ithink the biggest problem with these types of disturbing films that try to criticise facist regimes in the most shocking way possible is that it's honestly very difficult to rate them. A film, as with other artforms, is intended to instill feelings, emotions and personal reactions within each viewer. And how does one rationally summise their thoughts on a repulsive, discomforting film that magnifies such real problems infesting our society in its current state?

It turns out freedom is not our god-given right; at every living moment each individual is being oppressed by a facist state, be it by the government or on a personal level. Everything in this world is deliberately designed to leverage control over you. Punk State is a performance art. It delves into the corrupt state of our hallucinatory minds affected by the society that does not care for our personal wellbeing. There is no free will under a fascist regime. And like it or not, we're all living in it.

The importance of a toupee.