"The Sadness" is an exercise in extremity, and while the helmer has all the gore and ugliness imaginable, he neglects to create a pace to the endeavor, which never feels alive as it drags from one makeup effects display to the next.

| Original Score: C | Mar 24, 2025

Jabbaz’s primary focus is on cartoonishly gory entertainment. The director approaches scenes of carnage with glee...

| Oct 10, 2024

The Sadness is the epitome of nihilistic cinema.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 11, 2024

A gallery of cheap atrocities... [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 7, 2022

The Sadness is a brutal satire of the myriad ways that people fail each other in the middle of a crisis — people with power refuse to help those without it, and toxic masculinity rages unfettered.

| Sep 8, 2022

If you have limits, The Sadness will push them. If you think you can handle gory movies, it will make you question your resolve. And if you have a sensitive gag reflex, the film will test it.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 29, 2022

Disgusting carnage is made all the more impossible to look away from thanks to incredible practical effects, props and makeup. It's astounding work.

| May 27, 2022

The Sadness is a kick-ass action horror movie with elements of black comedy and a lot of gore. But it’s also such a gratuitously nasty piece of work, I couldn’t enjoy it much after a point. Needless to say, many horror fans will disagree.

| May 23, 2022

Rob Jabbaz‘s uncompromising commitment to pure survival horror and unbridled gory depravity make this one of the most singularly nasty and impressively vicious genre debuts to come around in some time.

| May 19, 2022

Rob Jabbaz's gorefest will undoubtedly turn off many, many viewers with its graphic content and subject matter, but those that can stomach it might find themselves wrapped up in all the chaos that unfolds.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 18, 2022

The Sadness builds on the experience of COVID to mash together disease and misanthropy into a new misbegotten birth of disgust and fear.

| Original Score: 8.6/10 | May 18, 2022

For those who love their blood and gore then the movie delivers on its practical effects.

| May 17, 2022

The assured command of style situates Jabbaz as an impressive new voice in horror cinema.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 17, 2022

A lean and mean pandemic-era horror film.

| May 16, 2022

The Sadness is one of the more aggressively bleak, disturbing, and depraved horror films I’ve ever seen.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 15, 2022

The Sadness is a visceral filmgoing experience, and in a lot of ways a major downer since the title also refers to all that we're left with when all the good is drained from the world, as it is in this movie.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 13, 2022

There’s something commending about a movie this proudly dystopian.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 12, 2022

Jabbaz’s movie isn’t exactly deep, but it does effectively channel his free-floating anxieties in ways both excessive and appropriately nasty.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 12, 2022

The pileup of bodies becomes so exhausting, and the violence is so widespread, that it renders any wider point moot.

| May 11, 2022

A disturbing, relentless and unflinching film: a knowing entrant to the zombie horror genre in many ways, but knowingly crossing into other genres, too, whilst never offering any respite from what unfolds.

| May 11, 2022