With Help Me Eros, Taiwanese actor-turned-director Lee Kang-sheng appears to be following the blueprint of his mentor, the great director Tsai Ming-liang, but with more dialogue and less of a dramatic impact when compared to the latter’s almost wordless recent films.

Four years after Lee’s directorial debut with The Missing – part of a double bill with Tsai’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn ­– this sophomore effort attempts to capture the eroticism and overwhelming sense of doom of his mentor’s absurdist erotica in The Wayward Cloud.

The film opens to television footage of a fish being sliced alive and partly cooked before being presented on a plate next to its head, which is still gasping for air. The commentators’ cynical remark that the fish must be crying for help makes for a less-than-subtle metaphor for the doomed existence of the pokerfaced protagonist, Ah Jie (played by Lee himself), a once-prosperous stockbroker who has had his car and apartment taken away from him and who now divides his time between lusting after the betel nut beauties below his apartment, stalking his suicide helpline counselor, and nurturing the marijuana plant hidden in his closet.

The pathos of an alienating society, marijuana-induced visions, and spectacular acrobatic sex of Help Me Eros disguise a peculiarly hollow experience considering its titillating subject matter and breathtaking visuals. Lee’s mentor’s long static shots are there of course, with Tsai acting as the film’s executive producer and production designer, but Lee goes a step further in his weird symbolism, with one character finding solace in a bathtub full of eels, while, in another scene, designer brand logos are projected (from nowhere) onto the participants of a threesome.

The result is a film that will entrance some viewers with its indelible images, while alienating most due to its lack of emotional vigour. This is one strictly for the cineastes. Edmund Lee

Dir Lee Kang-sheng, Category III, 103 mins, Limited release starting August 21