General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Great Buddha+

The Great Buddha+ (大佛普拉斯) is a 2017 Taiwanese black comedy directed by Huang Hsin-yao (黄信尧), his first fiction feature after a career in documentary filmmaking. It follows a night security guard at a Buddha statue factory and his scrap-collector friend, who pass their shifts watching dashcam footage from the factory owner's car and stumble onto a crime involving the politically connected boss.¹^•² The film won five Golden Horse Awards from ten nominations, took the Grand Prize and Best Narrative Feature at the Taipei Film Awards, and was Taiwan's entry for Best Foreign-Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards.³^•⁴^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Huang Hsin-yao, a documentary filmmaker; this was his fiction feature debut¹
Origin	Expanded from his 2014 short film The Buddha (大佛), a Golden Horse Award nominee for Best Short Film⁵
Title	"Plus" (普拉斯) is a transliteration of the English word, meaning an extended or enhanced version, a nod to smartphone model naming¹^•⁶
Visual scheme	Mostly black and white, with the boss's dashcam footage in color⁷
Golden Horse Awards (2017)	Won Best New Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Original Film Score, and Best Original Film Song; nominated for ten awards including Best Feature Film³
Taiwan release and box office	Opened 13 October 2017; cumulative ticket sales of NT$29,058,101⁸
Oscar submission	Taiwan's entry for Best Foreign-Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards²

Spoilers

Plot and style

Pickle (Cres Chuang) is the meek night security guard at a factory in rural southern Taiwan that casts massive bronze Buddha statues for its owner, Chairman Kevin (Leon Dai), an American-educated businessman with political connections. His friend Belly Button (Bamboo Chen) collects recycling by day and visits the guard booth at night, bringing pornographic magazines from his rounds. When the booth's television breaks down, Belly Button persuades Pickle to play the dashcam recordings from Kevin's Mercedes. The footage, seen in color against the film's black-and-white photography, shows Kevin's sexual encounters and, eventually, a murder that threatens both men.²^•⁹^•¹⁰

The color scheme carries the film's central metaphor: the poor live in black and white while the rich man's recorded world is glamorous and colorful.²^•⁷ Huang himself delivers a wry voiceover in Taiwanese Hokkien, interrupting the story to explain background details and comment on the action, a device carried over from his documentary narration style.⁴^•¹¹ The cinematography is by producer Chung Mong-hong, credited under the pseudonym Nagao Nakashima, in widescreen black and white with minimal camera movement.³^•¹⁰

Origin and production

Huang Hsin-yao graduated from the Graduate Institute of Sound and Image Studies at Tainan National University of the Arts and built his career in documentary. His earlier films include Nimbus (带水云) and Taivalu (沉没之岛), the latter winning Best Documentary and the NT$1 million Grand Prize at the 2011 Taipei Film Awards. In 2014 his 23-minute narrative short The Buddha was nominated for the Golden Horse Award for Best Short Film; jury member Chung Mong-hong approached him after the ceremony about developing it into a feature.⁵^•¹²^•¹³

The feature was produced by Chung Mong-hong and Yeh Ju-feng with a budget of about NT$30 million.¹⁴ It premiered as the opening film of the 2017 Taipei Film Festival and was released in Taiwanese theaters on 13 October 2017.⁸^•¹⁵ The dialogue mixes Mandarin and Taiwanese (Min Nan).⁴

Reception and awards

The film won five prizes at the 2017 Golden Horse Awards: Best New Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for Huang, Best Cinematography for Chung Mong-hong as Nagao Nakashima, Best Original Film Score for Lin Sheng-xiang, and Best Original Film Song for Lin's "Wu" (有无). Its ten nominations, including Best Feature Film and Best Supporting Actor for Leon Dai, made it the most-nominated picture of that year's ceremony.³^•⁵ At the 2017 Taipei Film Awards it took five prizes, including the NT$1 million Grand Prize and Best Narrative Feature.¹⁴ It also won the NETPAC Award at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, the 2018 Hong Kong Film Award for Best Chinese Language Film from the Two Coasts, and the Asian Film Award for Best Sound.³ Across festivals it recorded 23 wins and 34 nominations.³

Critical response was largely favorable. On Metacritic it holds a score of 80 based on seven critic reviews, and Rotten Tomatoes lists an 88 percent Tomatometer from 17 reviews.¹⁶^•¹⁷ Maggie Lee of Variety called it "convulsively funny yet uncompromisingly bleak," and Michael Rechtshaffen of the Los Angeles Times described it as "an outrageous, poignant punk Taiwanese black comedy."¹⁶ The most reserved major review came from Simon Abrams of RogerEbert.com, who scored it 2 of 4 and called it "much more rewarding to think about than it is to watch."¹⁶ On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.6/10 from about 5,600 users.¹⁸

Themes

Critics consistently read the film as a satire of class and corruption in contemporary Taiwan. John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that it "gets laughs out of the class system without being glib about its cruelties" and shows "how poverty robs even the dead of dignity."¹⁶ The Harvard Film Archive notes the irony the film enjoys in Kevin, a playboy sculptor whose factory produces sacred statues depicted as hollow, headless, or overpriced, and suggests that in an economy of favors and connections, justice can come only from the supernatural.¹⁰ In interviews Huang framed the film around social stratification, saying that voting power is limited by economic and political power and wealth.⁷ Scholarly work has examined its depiction of the gap between social strata through classes, gender, and ethnic groups, and the role of the director's Hokkien voiceover in marking that divide.¹¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Black comedy and satire films › Released 1998 to 2024

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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