This article analyzes the self-reflexive devices in a new Taiwanese film entitled The Great Buddha+ (大佛普拉斯 Dafo pulasi, dir. Huang Hsin-yao, 2017) and elaborates on the ethical implications of them through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy of infinite otherness and Adam Zachary Newton’s theory about narrative ethics. Starting with a comparison to Alfred Hitchcock’s classical thriller, Rear Window, it examines the three levels of subversion in The Great Buddha+, including a return of scopophilic gaze, a sensibility of documentation and an non-subjugating relations with others, and locates in these subversions a space for self-reflexivity and ethical encounter in a Levinasian sense. Noticing the small but momentous distance between historical persons and fictionalized characters and the difference between lived lives and stories or discourses, The Great Buddha+, this article argues, opens an integrated thriller narrative to encompass a more profound thinking on the ethics of self-other relation. As an attempt to apply ethical criticism to The Great Buddha+, this article explores the ethical experience in films and draws a connection between ethical philosophy and film studies in an East Asian context.