As the title indicates, this is the one of Yang’s films in which the air of menace, usually lurking at the edges of the frame, takes center stage. The film traces the intersecting fates of three couples in contemporary Taipei, all of whom are caught up in a torrent of violence either emotional or physical, or both. Two of the couples include relatively wealthy artists—one a novelist, the other a photographer—but the other consists of two young criminals, one a violent prostitute, the other her pimp. Standing apart from the three couples, but ultimately connected to all of them, is a policeman who is not so much an enforcer of the law as a witness of its seemingly unavoidable collapse. The harshness of the film’s plot, its elliptical nature and its sudden violence have all earned the film comparisons to Bresson.