General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Hole (1998 film)

The Hole (洞; Dòng) is a 1998 Taiwanese-French musical drama directed by Tsai Ming-liang, set in a quarantined Taipei apartment building in the last days of 1999, where a hole in the floor connects the apartments of two neighbors who have refused evacuation during a virus outbreak.¹ It was Tsai's fourth feature and won the FIPRESCI International Critics' Prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	洞 (Dòng); Taiwan/France, 1998, directed by Tsai Ming-liang¹
Leads	Lee Kang-sheng as the man upstairs and Yang Kuei-mei as the woman downstairs, both unnamed in the film²^•⁴
Origin	Produced for the French television project "2000, Seen By...", a series in which directors speculated on the new millennium³
Versions	First broadcast as a 69-minute television version titled Last Dance; the longer cut is the director's preferred version⁵
Music	Five songs by 1950s Hong Kong star Grace Chang: Calypso, Tiger Lady, I Want Your Love, Achoo Cha Cha, and I Don't Care Who You Are⁶
Awards	FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes 1998; Golden Hugo for Best Film at Chicago; at the 1999 Singapore International Film Festival, Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot and setting

The film is set in the final week of 1999. A mysterious epidemic, spread by cockroaches and causing victims to behave like insects, has ravaged Taiwan, and the government has declared the area a quarantine zone, ordering residents to evacuate and threatening to cut off water supply and garbage collection on January 1, 2000.⁴^•⁸ Rain falls without end.¹

Two residents of a crumbling apartment building stay behind. The man upstairs (Lee Kang-sheng) runs a nearly customerless grocery store and worries about a stray cat; the woman downstairs (Yang Kuei-mei) hoards toilet paper and spends her days mopping water leaking from the pipes above.⁴^•³ A plumber, called to fix the leak, cuts a hole through the concrete slab between the two apartments and never returns to finish the job.⁸ The hole first becomes an instrument of friction and spying: the man watches his neighbor, vomits into it when drunk, and shimmies his foot and then his leg through it when she is out.³ As isolation erodes both characters, it becomes their only means of human contact and the channel through which an oblique courtship develops.⁸

The musical numbers

The film's deadpan plague scenario is punctuated by five lavish fantasy sequences in which Yang lip-syncs songs by Grace Chang, the Shanghai-born star of 1950s Hong Kong musicals, backed by dancers in glamorous costumes.³^•⁶ The numbers never leave the building's hallways and stairwells, and they gradually incorporate the man upstairs, who strikes mid-century poses with his cigarettes.³ Critics have read them as charting the woman's inner life and as the film's escape from its otherwise dank, claustrophobic millennial unease; the Science Fiction Encyclopedia calls the film one of Tsai's few optimistic depictions of heterosexual relationships.⁴ The Village Voice's Dennis Lim called it "the most memorable fusion of song, dance and weather since Singin' in the Rain."⁶

Production and versions

In late 1995, French television commissioned directors from ten regions to imagine the year 2000 for the "2000, Seen By..." series; Tsai's film represented Taiwan and Asia, and his immediate instinct was to film a Taipei where the rain never stops.⁹ The series also included Hal Hartley's The Book of Life and Don McKellar's Last Night.³

The film was first broadcast in a 69-minute television version titled Last Dance; the longer theatrical cut is the director's preferred version.⁵ Reported runtimes differ across sources: the Big World Pictures press kit lists 89 minutes,⁶ Taiwan's Chinese Taipei Film Archive lists 92,¹⁰ Film at Lincoln Center lists 93,² and the Guardian, Eye Filmmuseum, and Science Fiction Encyclopedia list 95.¹¹^•¹²^•⁴ The film is in Mandarin and Taiwanese with English subtitles.²

Reception

The film won the FIPRESCI (International Critics') Prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Hugo for Best Film at Chicago.³^•⁶ At the 1999 Singapore International Film Festival it took Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress.⁷ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 86% Tomatometer from 22 reviews, with a critics consensus that it "finds love and horror in the humdrum rhythm of quarantine life."⁵

Retrospective attention. For years the film was available only in poor video copies, and it received its first dedicated New York theatrical release on a newly struck 35mm print beginning July 10, 2026, distributed by Big World Pictures.²^•¹³ Reviewers writing during the COVID-19 pandemic emphasized its prescience: the toilet-paper hoarding, the outbreak labeled "the Taiwan flu," and the social isolation of lockdown life.³ J. Hoberman of The New York Times wrote that it was "impressive a quarter century ago, it seems even more so today."² Scholarly work has read the film as a millennial text that dialogues with the memory of the ending century while projecting present anxieties onto the symbolic year 2000, proposing a way out through unmediated human connection.¹⁴

References

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