Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Incantation’ on Netflix, A Taiwanese Found Footage Horror Film Chock Full Of Ancient Taboos

Writer-director Kevin Ko’s Incantation arrives on Netflix after scaring up some serious bank at the Taiwanese box office, where it debuted last spring before becoming the country’s highest-grossing horror film of all time. In Ko’s found footage exercise, a woman struggles to free her preschooler daughter from the very ancient and very deadly curse that she and her ghost-chasing college pals bungled their way into unleashing. Do her efforts work? Well, just remember to answer your name silently. 

INCANTATION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In the out-of-order timeline of Incantation, we meet Ruo-nan (Tsai Hsuan-yen) in the present, where she’s at her wit’s end. “Six years ago, I violated a terrible taboo,” she tells the video camera that’s become her omnipresent companion. “Anyone who came too close was befallen with misfortunes I cannot explain.” She lost her parents to a Final Destination-like calamity, lost custody of her infant daughter Duo-do (Huang Sin-ting), and lost herself inside a mental institution, where a doctor attempted to make sense of her ravings about a “tunnel you must not enter.” Six years ago, when Ruo-non first traveled to a remote mountain village to observe the mysterious ancient rituals practiced by the family elders of her boyfriend Dong (Sean Lin) and mouthy pal Yuan (RQ), it was all in good fun, an insensitive goof for their ghost-hunting social media page. Six years ago, she didn’t even know she was pregnant. And six years ago, she definitely didn’t understand or respect the curse that would be unleashed by Yuan and Dong’s entrance into the village temple’s tunnel.

As Incantation shifts between a distraught Ruo-nan in the present and footage Yuan shot on that fateful trip, it also fills in the backstory of Ruo-nan’s life with her daughter Duo-do. Released from the institution, she reclaimed her from the foster care where Ming (Kao Ying-hsuan) became a father figure. But despite her efforts to fortify their home against the supernatural reach of the curse, trouble began on day one of Ruo-nan and Duo-do’s new life together. Her camera chronicles the disturbances, as things go bump in the night and Duo-do sees and talks to the “baddies” floating near the ceiling. And when the baddies reveal more about the ritual and the tunnel, Duo-do ends up with a traumatic brain injury.

On the run from authorities with her daughter and their new ally Ming, Ruo-nan becomes convinced that returning to the village temple and subjecting Duo-do to folk medicine is her only chance for survival. And when Ming researches the footage on Yuan’s camera and connects the rituals to the worship of a malicious tantric buddhist deity, he discovers that the vaunted incantation itself – “Hou-ho-xiu-yi, si-sei-wu-ma” – isn’t a prayer at all, but a dreaded curse of sharing. Let this deity learn your name, and your time is up.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 supernatural horror film It Follows explores the deadly ramifications of an entity’s passage between sexual partners. Get it, and it gets you. And obviously there’s an entire wing of the horror library devoted to found footage elements, from the fates of the unlucky souls investigating the Blair Witch (choose your fighter, the original 1999 film or Adam Wingard’s 2016 riff on the material), to the cursed videotape of the Ring franchise.

Performance Worth Watching: Tsai Hsuan-yen manages well the technical complications of the found footage genre, where acting is meant to convey the shifting moods of a real person seen on film. For the purposes of Incantation, Tsai depicts Ruo-nan’s desperate hope for her daughter’s salvation as steadily being crushed by weighty, cowering fear.

Memorable Dialogue: Speaking to her video camera, and therefore to the viewing audience, Ruo-nan pleads directly for help. “If you can, please recite this with me. Doing it in your mind is fine too. Hou-ho-xiu-yi, si-sei-wu-ma.” Ruo-nan isn’t just breaking the fourth wall. She’s praying with it.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: More than once while watching Incantation, you’ll ask yourself, “Where did this footage come from? Did the malicious deity herself shoot this?” It’s a constant sticking point with the found footage genre, which always has to fib against the hard truths of onscreen storytelling, and this film’s non-linear composition doesn’t help it in this regard. Ruo-nan’s heartfelt fourth wall-shattering plea for our assistance in barrierizing her daughter’s life via repeated mantra doesn’t forgive some her dicier decisions, like subjecting Duo-do in the first place to a life lived in the clutches of an all-powerful curse that’s already killed at least six people with even tangential connections to Ruo-nan. She tells us she did this out of love for her daughter. But from the moment we meet her, it feels like nothing but the cold calculus of fear. And what about the flawed decision-making of six years ago that originally led the “ghostbusters” to that remote mountain village? It wasn’t out of any street-level ethnographic interest. Watching the footage of Yuan and Dong stomping their way into the evil tunnel, desecrating altars and invading sacred chambers, it almost makes you root for the evil ancient deity.

Once a choice is made to not question its characters’ motives and enjoy Incantation for its surface-level scares, there’s a charge in its sudden, disturbing visuals and the manipulation of religious script and iconography into a vehicle for fear. Ming’s investigative visit to the Yunnan province and the lair of an elderly monk feels like he’s about to commune with ancient evil. And the sound editing in Incantation emphasizes the otherworldly grip of Buddhist throat singing, especially when linked with the runic symbols and ritualistic sacrifices related to the curse.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Incantation proves there’s still some vitality left in found footage horror, and offsets most of its narrative plod with foreboding ancient ritualism and a few jarring scares.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges