Deconstructing spiritual notions with regards to the art of tattoo, the relationship between sex and guilt and the human need for recognition and remembrance, Zero Chou's Spider Lilies is an exercise of philosophy. Its many complicated layers weave into and out of one another, the meanings muddying with each intersection as if the film is a silk screen of messages worn down with multiple passes. For all its lyrical beauty, much of it crafted through cinematographer Hoho Liu's lens, Spider Lilies is too often in love with its symbolism and too little with simplicity.

As if they represent two different sides of femininity, whimsical drifter and Webcam girl Jade (Rainie Yang) foils and renews a love for the outwardly composed tattoo artist Takeko (Isabella Leong). Meeting Takeko accidently after a separation of ten years, Jade realizes that the quiet woman is her first love. Insistent on rekindling a connection, Jade harries Takeko to give her the same tattoo of spider lilies that the artist herself has. It's a tattoo, she iterates several times, that will remind her of love.

Taught to associate sexuality with sorrow, however, Takeko keeps her distance from Jade, commanding her life as primary caretaker of her brother Ching (Jian-hung Shen), who suffers dissociative disorder, with diffident ease. To remind her brother of the past, Takeko bears the same tattoo as her father, who died during an earthquake when the siblings were young. Although a symbol of death, the spider lilies, said to be the flowers that line the way to hell and cause loss of memory and consciousness, creep up and down Takeko's left arm softly, marking her distinctly as a woman facing hardship. Outside a playful relationship with a perpetual customer Adong (Yuan-chieh Shih), Takeko keeps to herself, rarely changing her routines and habits.

Lonely and still suffering the emotional scars of the abandonment of her parents, Jade likewise is no stranger to sadness. In her heartbreaking and wildly unsucessful Webcam confessions, she's alternatingly seductive and vulnerable. Her innocence immediately captures undercover cop David (Kris Shie) who is sent to the Web site to spy on her activities. Confusing David with Takeko, both who visit her site with pseudonyms, Jade believes that Takeko is in love with her, and actualizing her desires, she rushes to the tattoo studio to find Takeko has completed the sketch for her tattoo, an intertwining of bright jasmine.

From pain to pleasure, Jade and Takeko explore one another, but the luxury is swiftly stolen from the pair, who each fall back into their individual forms of despair. It's as if neither can heal the other, although Takeko does try to remedy her obsession with guilt and fear of death, perhaps too late, in the film.

Spider Lilies is both undeniably beautiful and undeniably sad, yet it's so internally crafted that its ultimate meaning is obscured by the quiet souls of its characters who see and synthesize almost entirely in metaphor. Much like the incomplete tattoo Jade bears of jasmine at the end, what Chou wants her audience to part with is only half realized.

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