INCANTATION (2022 - Chinese)

Studio:     Netflix
Director:    Kevin Ko
Writer:     Kevin Ko, Che-Wei Chang
Producer:  Jacys Cheng-Yu Lin, Hsu-fen Yang
Stars:     Hsuan-Yen Tsai, Sin-Ting Huang, Ying-Hsuan Kao, Sean Lin, RQ

Review Score:

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Summary:

Believing herself to be cursed for violating a cult ritual six years earlier, a single mother desperately fights to save her possibly possessed daughter.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

For their “Strange Murmurs” internet channel, amateur ghost busters Yuan, Dom, and Dom’s pregnant girlfriend Ronan travel to investigate a reportedly haunted tunnel hidden within Dom’s family’s secluded compound. Ronan discovers that the Chen family belongs to a strange cult that worships Dahei Mother-Buddha, a deity whose face is oddly obscured or covered on all idols depicting her. Using an odd incantation, Ronan participates in a ritual where she unwittingly pledges her unborn daughter to Mother-Buddha.

Ronan has a private conversation with a young girl who is revered by the cult as a centerpiece of their rituals. Ronan asks about the girl’s missing left ear. The girl cryptically explains that she was chosen by the gods and Mother-Buddha took her ear so its flesh could bless everyone.

Yuan, Dom, and Ronan trespass into the compound’s forbidden area. They find the little girl entranced in front of the haunted tunnel with runes written all over her body. Ronan stays with the girl while the two men enter the tunnel. After Yuan and Dom disturb several altars of ceremonial offerings, paranormal activity explodes throughout the passageway. Dom becomes possessed, smashes his head against a wall repeatedly, attacks Yuan, and finally dies. Yuan loses his mind and eventually dies too. Suddenly bleeding from between her legs, Ronan finds entranced cultists all over the chaotic compound.

Ronan comes to believe that violating the taboo invoked a curse. Claiming that anyone who watches the video Yuan and Dom shot in the tunnel will invite misfortune and death, Ronan ends up committed to a mental institution. When her daughter Dodo is born, she gives up the girl to foster care.

Six years later, Ronan finally regains custody of Dodo. Ronan picks up Dodo from Ming, a man who runs a foster home and has come to see himself as Dodo’s daddy. Ronan begins constantly recording daily activities as a video diary for Dodo.

Ronan and Dodo’s new home is soon upset by ongoing instances of paranormal activity. Dodo also starts showing signs of possible possession, and her disturbing behavior includes attacking a boy in her kindergarten class. Dodo attributes some strange happenings to an invisible presence while school officials remain suspicious of Ronan’s questionable parenting.

After another encounter with the entity leads to apparent possession, Ronan rushes Dodo to the hospital. An administrator informs Ronan that the court is revoking her custody rights, so Ronan sneaks Dodo back down to her car. Ming from the foster home discovers Ronan kidnapping her daughter. However, Ming takes pity on the girl’s possibly paranormal condition and helps them elude police.

Ronan and Ming take Dodo to a temple. Mister Ching and his wife Madam Ching agree to perform an exorcism rite on Dodo, but only if Ronan agrees not to feed the girl for seven days.

In the meantime, Ming repairs the video camera broken six years ago to recover the tunnel footage. After watching the footage, Ming begins losing teeth and suffering nosebleeds.

Ming finds footage of twisted text on a scroll in the footage. Ming flies to Yunnan so a Tantric monk can translate the Brahmic script and reveal the origins of the incantation that the cult regularly uses as a supposed blessing. When Ronan receives the translation, she tells the camera that Dom’s family inherited bad karma because the deity they worship is malicious, and the chant is supposedly meant as a ward to receive blessings and protect the person who chants it. Ming becomes possessed and kills himself by repeatedly bashing his head against his computer, which forwards Ronan the cursed tunnel video.

With grotesque sores inexplicably growing all over the girl’s body, Ronan violates Dodo’s fast by feeding her a pineapple bun. Dodo vomits the bun and with it comes a maggot, which symbolizes a component of the cult’s curse.

Ronan rushes Dodo back to the temple to find Mister Ching dead. Madam Ching becomes possessed as paranormal activity takes over the temple. Dodo floats to the ceiling before falling back down to the floor.

Ronan takes Dodo back to the hospital where she recites the incantation at her unresponsive daughter’s bedside. During the night, Dodo enters a trance and walks outside to a naked young woman with runes written all over her body lying unconscious in a lot. Now a teenager, the young woman turns out to be the girl from the cult, and she is taken inside the hospital. Upon realizing where the mystery patient came from, Ronan secretly cuts off her right ear.

Deciding Dodo would be better off without her, Ronan writes runes all over her body and returns to the forbidden tunnel where she recites the incantation and offers the ear as a sacrifice. After asking viewers to recite the incantation with her, Ronan confesses the truth about the chant. Ronan explains that it is not a blessing, but rather, reciting the incantation sacrifices one’s self to the curse. Its accompanying symbol diffuses Mother-Buddha’s curse onto strangers, and the more that people share the curse, the more diluted it becomes. By tricking people into watching the tunnel video, Ronan hoped she could dilute the curse enough to lessen it for Dodo.

While she herself wears a blindfold, Ronan removes a covering from a Mother-Buddha statue so the camera can see her wormhole-like face. Ronan becomes possessed and starts bashing her head repeatedly. Dodo eventually heals.

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Review:

“Incantation” made waves in its native Taiwan by grossing enough money to become that country’s biggest box office success in 2022 as well as the top Taiwanese horror film of all time. Every article about Netflix’s acquisition of the title included a description of “Incantation” as the “scariest Taiwanese film ever.” That claim always came in quotation marks, so apparently someone actually said it, although it’s never been clear exactly who that person was. I can only assume he, she, or they has a low bar for appraising scariness, or else Taiwanese cinema just doesn’t produce stiff competition in that category, because from my vantage point, “Incantation” is about as ho-hum as Asian horror gets.

“Incantation” takes place across two timelines, arguably more if you count curious cases where the film flashes back to the previous day, then to the previous week, then back to the present. The idea is that six years ago, Ronan and two of her ghost-hunting friends intruded on a family’s private cult ritual. Technically, they were invited since Ronan’s baby daddy belonged to the family. But the trio made matters worse by trespassing into a reportedly haunted tunnel where everything went tits up.

Due to the movie’s non-linear tale-spinning, recounting precisely what happened would be revealing semi-spoilers. What can be said is that Ronan lost her marbles. Believing they invoked a curse, and convinced that curse could carry over to anyone who watched the video they shot inside the tunnel, Ronan went into a mental institution while her unborn baby would ultimately end up in foster care.

Now that six years have passed and she’s presumably better, Ronan finally gets her daughter Dodo back. As soon as she brings the girl home though, paranormal activity quickly besieges them both. For Ronan, her supernatural terror involves mundane maggots invading her purse and other simple spooks of the “that’s it?” variety like unexplained nosebleeds. Meanwhile, Dodo deals with every horror movie kid’s favorite, an unseen entity only she can communicate with, and an apparent case of possible possession. How do the cult and cursed video from six years ago connect?

Bolting back and forth between what happened then and what’s happening now makes for a viewing experience that’s as disjointed as it is distracting. Director Kevin Ko tries keeping elements of the unknown in play by unfolding the story this way, but because “Incantation” plays out as “found footage,” two timelines don’t make sense for the format because no one would ever edit the material this way.

That’s true in a general sense, although not entirely accurate for “Incantation,” so I’m being slightly unfair. The technique almost pays off because the plot builds to a reveal that relies on keeping a couple of chronological pieces out of order. See, there’s a light interactive element to the movie in that Ronan is showing us viewers this footage for a specific reason, and she wants us to participate along with her whenever it’s time to recite the titular chant. When she finally explains why she kept certain things secret, we get an “aha!” moment that’s almost a wickedly clever little conceit. Except after a long one hour and 45 minutes of going in circles with boring boos and drawn out drama, you’re so over the whole anemic affair that the reveal doesn’t resonate like it should.

Pacing problems come from how typical all of “Incantation’s” scares are. Cursed videos. Strange rituals. Unexplained trances. Even possessed people killing themselves by repeatedly bashing their heads against walls, which happens at least three times here, are all things fright film aficionados have been through countless times before. The only boon keeping “Incantation” just above average, or slightly better than below average depending on your personal tolerance level for tropes, is that the unique setting at least allows us looks at these routine chiller clichés from the lens of a different culture.

Someone who has seen, let’s say, four or fewer films involving “found footage” or possessed children might have their attention held by “Incantation’s” comparatively quiet pulse of plain paranormal phenomena. Taiwanese scenery allows for a brief break from the same abandoned hospitals and white-walled box homes of a suburban American family we usually see in this sort of thing. But even Minor League horror fans have taken too many trips to these basic ballparks, and taking another trot around their bland bases doesn’t offer enticing excitement at all.

Review Score: 45

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