Midnight Playground (2023)

I don't Know.

First Viewing

There are evenings when I have nothing to do. Or rather, there are things I could do, but inspiration is somewhere else — on a lunch break, maybe asleep somewhere — so I stay awake fighting insomnia, looking for something to keep me company. I usually end up watching movies: it’s an old habit, almost a reflex. When I can’t write, I watch; when I can’t feel, I look for someone else who can feel for me.

That night, while scrolling absent-mindedly through the streaming apps I use, I came across Midnight Playground. The title intrigued me, as did the cover image — dark, undefined, yet strangely magnetic. I read the brief, vague synopsis, and that was enough to make me click play. I had the feeling it would be something unusual, maybe difficult, but I thought at least I would be able to follow its meaning.

It didn’t turn out that way. I watched it once and didn’t understand it, then a second and a third time, still lost in the same confusion. The film left something behind, but I couldn’t translate it. It was as if it were telling me something I hadn’t yet learned how to hear. Refusing to give up, I started looking for information. I wanted to understand what the director meant, because what I had read in the synopsis didn’t match what I had seen. I wanted to learn to watch it the way he had imagined it — to recognize the hidden meanings behind a narrative that seemed to move like a dream.

!!!! SPOILER !!!

Midnight Playground is built like a temporal short-circuit. The two periods — 1954 and 2022 — are never clearly marked on screen with captions or color changes; instead, they overlap. That’s what makes it so disorienting. The only way to know which era you’re in is by paying attention to visual and sound details, because the film scatters them subtly, like crumbs.

In 2022, the background noises belong to a modern city: traffic, engines, distant voices, the glow of neon lights. The shots are smoother, sometimes brighter, and there’s a sense of freer movement.
In 1954, everything is quieter. The old-style streetlamps, the rougher image grain, and the feeling of tighter, more secretive space stand out. The clothes are stiffer, the tones more muted. These aren’t drastic contrasts, but small shifts that alternate and blur, creating that constant question: where am I now?

The film never names the characters in the contemporary part, but in 1954 we learn that the man is Huang Liang-sheng — the historical figure, a young gay man living in a time when he couldn’t exist openly. The other man — the one in 2022 — isn’t his descendant or reincarnation; he’s more like an echo. Both live the same experience in different moments, without ever meeting. The park is the same physical place, but it also acts as a point of contact between two lives, two solitudes.

To understand the film, you have to abandon the idea of a linear story. Midnight Playground doesn’t narrate “a” story; it shows a repetition. What happens in the present is what happened in the past, and the rain — constant in both timelines — signals that the two dimensions are speaking to each other. When the camera moves as though you were the one walking, it’s no longer clear whether you’re watching or remembering. You exist inside both eras at once.

The key to orienting yourself lies in noticing how sound, light, and distance change between people.

- In the present, distance is physical but not social: you can look, but not touch.
- In the past, it’s the opposite: closeness is forbidden, the contact fleeting and risky.

These two worlds keep mirroring each other until they fuse, and at that point the film stops asking you to understand when you are — it asks you to understand who you are in that moment.

Midnight Playground is deliberately ambiguous. It offers no answers, but builds a language of correspondences. If you stop looking for narrative logic, you begin to see that each era is just another way of telling the same loneliness.

The ending of Midnight Playground leaves many questions open. After a long sequence of hesitant movements and uncertain gazes, something sudden happens: one of the two men approaches the other aggressively, as if trying both to push him away and to hold him back. It’s a difficult moment to interpret because it’s not clear whether it comes from anger, fear, or desire.

There’s no clear indication of what’s really happening, and the film doesn’t offer explanations. Everything focuses on that tension — a contact that feels more like a confrontation than an encounter, a gesture that could be rejection just as easily as an attempt to affirm something. From that point on, the distinction between the two eras seems to dissolve. It’s no longer clear whether we’re in the present or the past, or which of the two men is acting. All that remains is the sense that something has broken and can’t be repaired.

It’s an ending that leaves you suspended. It can be read in many ways: as a reaction of fear toward something one can’t accept, as an eruption of desire that’s been repressed for too long, or as an attempt to destroy something before it becomes real. There’s no single interpretation, only multiple possibilities that make the scene both unsettling and necessary.

What remains afterward is silence. The rain keeps falling, the park returns to emptiness, and the viewer is left with the feeling that the film hasn’t really ended — that something remains suspended somewhere, like a thought that can’t quite find its words.

After watching Midnight Playground several times, I’m still left with the same feeling of uncertainty. Even now that I can distinguish the time periods, the gestures, the silences, the film never fully reveals itself. It’s as if understanding only takes you so far, and beyond that point lies something unreachable — a thought that refuses to be translated.

Perhaps that’s how it’s meant to work: not to tell, but to remain. Each viewing brings me back to the same place, only with a deeper awareness. I realize that what stays with me isn’t the story, but the way I’ve moved through it — the breathing, the rain, the fear, the need to understand, and the surrender that follows.

Midnight Playground isn’t a film to “like” or to “understand”; it’s a film to experience. The more you observe it, the clearer it becomes that its power lies in how fragile it allows itself to be — the same fragility that belongs to anyone who tries, in the dark, to exist even for a moment.

In the end, there’s no message left behind, only a presence. Something that keeps watching you even after the screen goes dark, like a memory that doesn’t belong to you, but that — for some reason — you can’t quite forget.

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