Summary
A visually faithful video game adaptation covers a turbulent and dark period of Taiwanese history, fusing several genres together with mixed results.
Based on a video game of the same name, here’s a film with a specific ready-made audience. A follow-up to director John Hsu’s VR short Your Spiritual Temple Sucks, this psychological horror blends genres and has already seen some box office success.
Like the 2016 game, from Taiwanese developers Red Candle Games, it takes the rather unique setting of 1960s ‘White Terror’ period in Taiwan. Against the backdrop of the suppression of political dissidents and literature, student Fang Ray-shin (Gingle Wang) falls for teacher Chang Ming-Hui (Fu meng-po) as a form of escapism.
What could have been a simple star-crossed love story rapidly shifts genres with the disappearance of Chang. Only a handful of people remember his existence, and the building becomes a residence for evil dead things.
My gaming days are more or less behind me, mostly because I only buy a new console every 12 years or so. Yet even I can totally see the influence here even without knowing the source material. It’s a bit like Silent Hill or similar survival horror games: it’s all about mood and pacing.
The opening sequences work incredibly well, and starts out as a slickly shot and moody thriller. There’s one early sequence where Ray-shin walks down a long corridor, mirroring the side-scrolling aesthetics of the original. It’s not just an attempt at fidelity but a cool screen motif as well.
By the same token, for all of its real-world horrors, the White Terror period of Taiwan is a fascinating setting for a genre film. The lengthy martial law era has been covered in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989), along with the Hollywood formula of Formosa Betrayed (2009). To use it as the backdrop for supernatural horror is clever.
It’s just that the union didn’t always gel for me, resulting in some tonal confusion and occasionally laughable monster jumps that took me right out of the moment. It makes the problematic aspects of the narrative, where one might see the backdrop usage as exploitative, all the more apparent. By having an each-way bet, it’s not completely effective as horror or historical drama.
DETENTION (返校) will undoubtedly develop a cult audience beyond the gamer communities. After all, I’m an unapologetic fan of the Resident Evil film franchise, despite their diminishing quality and my inability to finish a game. At the very least, it’s encouraging to see Taiwan embracing so many aspects of their own history and pop culture to audience-driven success.
2019 | Taiwan| DIRECTOR: John Hsu | WRITERS: John Hsu, Fu Kai-ling, Chien Shi-keng | CAST: Gingle Wang, Fu Meng-po, Tseng Ching-hua, Cecilia Choi | DISTRIBUTOR: Taiwan Film Festival (AUS), Warner Bros. Taiwan| RUNNING TIME: 105 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 9-30 July 2020 (TWFF)
