Now recite with me: Hou-ho-xiu-yi, si-sei-wu-ma!
"Incantation" has been called the scariest film ever to come out of Taiwan and in my eyes it’s one of the most intense and effective horror movies that’s been released in recent years. It's truly something that will stay with you for some time after experiencing it!
Speaking of incantations, did you recite those words up there? Oh, you did? I expected you to just skip that part but...well never mind, we’ll get back to that later so just relax. Everything will be just fine. Now let’s dig in to this juicy piece of horror cinema!
Li Ruo-nan (Hsuan-yen Tsai) is a single mom who reunites with her 6-Year-old daughter Dodo (Sin-Ting Huang) who has been living in a foster home, while Li spent some time in the loony bin. Now, however, it seems that Li has turned her life around and she is allowed to take back custody of her daughter under some supervision.
Li and Dodo move in together eager to start a happy and peaceful life. But as it soon turns out Li’s dark past still has a bone to pluck with her. While mother and daughter get reacquainted, they both gradually start to experience strange and frightening occurrences that just keeps getting worse.
Li soon realizes that this has to do with a certain event in her past- one where she broke a religious taboo which placed a curse on her. The curse that was laid upon her on that day has returned and the malevolent forces that comes with are now aiming for Li's daughter.
“Incantation” is directed by Kevin Ko, who debuted in 2009 with slasher-horror
“Jue ming pai dui” (2009), and who now makes a grand return to the genre - hopefully to stick around for a while.
“Incantation” is made as a found-footage film, a format that has been extensively used in horror ever since “The Blair Witch Project” (1990) the movie that really popularized it. I personally love it because of the raw and documentary-feel can bring to a story if used right.
Far from everyone manages to truly master this format, but after seeing “Incantation” it’s pretty obvious that Kevin Ko understands it well and makes great use of it.
The story is presented mainly from Li’s perspective as she buys a camera at the beginning of the film to record a diary of her and Dodo’s new life together. We are also presented with old video footage from past events in Li's life which is used as flashbacks throughout the film to give us a background to and explain present events. At several points in the film Li also speaks directly to the audience through her camera – like a vlog – which really gets us close to both her and other characters.
“Incantation” has its flaws here and there that unfortunately hurts the overall experience - at least for me. The main problem is that it has a runtime of 1 hour and 50 minutes which I found too long and I also felt that it slowed down the phasing and intensity of the film. The other thing is that it has a few cheap jump scares here and there which I found completely unnecessary and that I think ruins some of the very intense and “keep you on the edge of your seat”-atmosphere at the film’s dark finale.
However, the film mostly keeps the horrors off screen and makes the audience imagine it with their own minds – like when Dodo starts speaking with something sitting right beside her that we can’t see – and that is some of the most frightening parts of the film. It also has some truly raw and shocking imagery which almost makes you want to turn your eyes away. The scenes when Dodo is possessed by the evil entity that haunts her and her mother, and begins to display pretty horrific physical symptoms are not for the faint of heart.
Now let's get back to the words I told you to recite at the beginning of this review. Another thing that “Incantation” does in a very interesting and effective way – which is not often seen in horror these days - is to call upon the audience to participate in the story. During Li’s vlogs she teaches us a chant and asks us to recite it with her.
This chant is supposed to protect her from evil that has befallen her and her daughter. We can do this vocally or through thought and even though we do not at all understand what the words mean it’s very hard not to follow along. I would have loved to see this movie in a theatre, just to see how a packed movie theatre would react to it.
I don’t want to tell you more about the chant – you know what you need to do to find the answers. The film loosely inspired by a supposedly true story of an incident that took place in Kaohsiung, Taiwan back in 2005 where a family claimed to be possessed by various deities originating from Chinese folk religion.
You can catch Kevin Ko’s “Incantation” over at Netflix and I highly suggest that you do so as it is one of the better horror movies that has been released in recent years - and one that really puts Taiwan on the horror movie map!
Title: Incantation (Zhou)
Release date: March 18, 2022
Run time: 1 hours 50 minutes
Genre: Horror
Country: Taiwan
Director: Kevin Ko
Writers: Che Wei-Chang, Kevin Ko
Stars: Hsuan-yen Tsai, Sin-Ting Huang, Ying-Hsuan Kao
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