At Asian Movie Pulse, friend of the Gutter Earl Jackson writes about Cheng Wei-hao’s Marry My Dead Body (2023)!

“For years lesbian feminist film scholarship entailed archeological detective work, most notably excavating the subtexts of Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock 1940) and The Haunting (Robert Wise 1963). In peculiar reversal, I am going to try a simlar dive into a film to salvage its male homosexuality. While Rebecca and The Haunting may have repressed latent desires under a gothic mood piece, Marry My Dead Body harbors a sexual ambivalence within a blatant coming out wake. In doing this, I am actually not faulting the film but rather the limitations on sexual legibility under even the most seemingly benign, apparently inclusive heteronormative social order. Moreover, while exposing what the film cannot do, I want to underscore what it does beautifully: it dramatizes as a default aspect of contemporary life, a kind of habituated melancholia interrupted by an intimacy that at first seems like an assault.

Read more here.