Director – Kevin Ko, Screenplay – Che-Wai Chang & Kevin Ko, Producers – Shu-lin Chang, Chun-lin Chen, Yu-ta Chou, Yun-Hsiang Fan, Hsin-ya Huang, Kevin Ko, Chien-Chou Kuo Wei-Lung Li, Yi-ying Li, Chia-chang Lin, Jacys Lin & Push Yang, Photography – Ko-Chin Chen, Music – Rockid Lee, Visual Effects – Moonshine VFX Animation Lab (Supervisors – Meng-Cheng Hsieh & Min-Pin Huang), Makeup Effects – Meta SFX Makeup && True Effect, Production Design – Party Art Design Studio & Otto Chen. Production Company – JHT Entertainment/Empty Shells.
Cast
Hsuan-yen Tsai (Li Ronan), Sin-Ting Huang (Chen Dodo), Ying-Hsuan Kao (Hsieh Chi-ming), RQ (Chen-Chen Yuan), Sean Lin (Dom)
Plot
Li Ronan finds that her daughter Dodo is behaving oddly in preschool. At home, Dodo insists that malevolent spirits she calls baddies are in the room. Li Ronan is certain that this ties back to six years earlier when she was part of a team that ran a ghostbusters video channel. They travelled into the countryside to participate in the Chen family ritual, although Li Ronan was refused because she was not family. However, they later snuck in to observe with video cameras and ventured down into a tunnel they had been forbidden to enter to discover something horrific. Li Ronan believes that something from the violation they conducted now haunts the daughter that she was pregnant with at the time.
Incantation was the fifth film for Taiwanese director Kevin Ko. Ko had previously made the horror film Invitation Only (2009), Doomsday Reverse (2012), the romance Dude’s Manual (2018) and the superhero romantic comedy A Choo (2020). Incantation was apparently the highest grossing Taiwanese-made horror film of all time.
The Found Footage horror film has been with us since The Blair Witch Project (1999). Blair Witch also popularised the theme of Paranormal Investigators armed with videocameras investigating spooky phenomena and this has been copied a great deal by other films since then to the point it is now a commonplace cliché. The scenes in the home with the young girl seeing ‘baddies’ and doors slamming draws just as much on the later developments of the Found Footage film that came with Paranormal Activity (2007).
Despite the tapped-out feeling of over-familiarity with the Found Footage format, Kevin Ko proves an assured director. He manages to get something quite spooky out of the scenes with the little girl returned home and starting to behave oddly and of possibly shadowy things lurking in the apartment. There is quite something to the scenes with the camera placed on the ground calmly observing as the daughter steps up onto balcony ledge or picks up a knife.
Hsuan-yen Tsai as Li Ronan
Elsewhere, we get horrible images like the woman in the background of a glass-working exhibition who calmly places a hot poker in her mouth; of RQ abruptly returning from the tunnel with bloody mouth and teeth falling out; or where Ying-Hsuan Kao starts battering his forehead to a bloody pulp in front of the webcam.
As we watch the investigators eavesdropping on the family’s ceremonies about the Mother Buddha, there is a feel of uncovering something forbidden. Ko generates reasonable atmosphere out of what is going on with the ritual and the family’s insistence on them staying out of the ceremony, the mystery about the daughter’s behaviour and the increasingly more frantic desperation in the efforts to do something by mother Hsuan-yen Tsai (who gives a fine performance).
The downside of Incantation is that despite a 150 minute running time and a complex storyline switching back and forward between two time periods, it is not always clear why things are happening. The details of the ritual and the purpose for holding it are kept vague, as is what is encountered down in the tunnel.
