Fantasia 2020 review: The iPhone-shot Taiwanese germaphobe comedy ‘IWeirDo’ is eerily prescient

The first virtual edition of Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival is here! In the coming days, we’ll be presenting capsule reviews of a number of films screening at the festival, filmmaker interviews, and much more. All of our 2020 Fantasia coverage can be found here. For the full schedule and tickets, head to the Fantasia screening site. 

Taiwanese writer-director Liao Ming-yi had no inkling of how our lives would play out in this new COVID world when developing IWeirDo, but the film has become eerily prescient in how it depicts the lives of a pair of acute germaphobes.

Chen Po-ching (Austin Lin) describes himself as having OCD — he wears a medical mask, constantly cleans his apartment, and obsessively washes his hands, traits that may have seemed excessive not too long ago but are all too common now. Chen Po-ching feels like a social outcast until he meets a fellow germaphobe in Chen Ching (Nikki Hsieh), and they begin a quirky romance based on pushing each other to confront their phobias, including eating at the filthiest street food stall they can find. Their relationship is progressing smoothly until Chen Po-ching suddenly wakes up and is “cured” from his OCD, and begins to live the sort of “normal” life he never had.

Touted as the first Asian feature film to be entirely shot on an iPhone (the film was shot using the iPhone XS Max), the first half of the film is shot in portrait mode which feels like watching a very long Instagram Story, an appropriate choice given the young age of the characters. After Chen Po-ching’s sudden “cure,” the film shifts over to a widescreen landscape mode that really opens up the film considerably, just as his life and outlook have been expanded once he is free of his phobias.

IWeirDo may have been completed before the pandemic hit, but it will likely go down as the first major movie about life under COVID. It’s somewhat uncomfortable to watch characters don masks and gloves to leave the house, but at least their germaphobia is played for laughs instead of abject terror. That said, those actually suffering from OCD or serious phobias may find the film’s handling of these disorders to be pretty insensitive — you can’t simply shake off something like OCD at the drop of a hat, as Chen Po-ching manages to do here.

The film loses some of its quirky energy in the second half where it becomes more of a standard romantic drama, but IWeirDo has enough, well, weirdness, to make it memorable, even if you’ll be mulling over COVID safety precautions the whole time.