Incantation (2022)

directed by Kevin Ko

Taiwan

111 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I was looking forward to this one for a while based on the strength of the reactions to it that I'd been seeing. I've been having trouble motivating myself to watch new films lately, so to see one that not only didn't disappoint but well exceeded my expectations was very satisfying. There are ways in which this movie resembles a lot of things I've seen before, but the end product that it delivers is on the whole much different from all other things that share similar themes.

Incantation opens with some breakage of the third wall as the main character introduces her situation - or what she wants us to believe her situation is - on camera. The point she's trying to make is that human will can, to some degree, literally influence the material world; the way you think you see things or want to see things can alter the way they actually look. As an example she puts up on screen two optical illusions similar to the very popular "rotating ballerina" one where, depending on how you perceive it, a spinning wheel can either be going left or right, or a train can either be oncoming or leaving. I found this a very interesting thing to include in a fictional narrative. We're used to films immediately reaching for special effects to show us breaks in reality, so the fact that this film utilizes the actual brain of the viewer in all of its uncanniness really adds a layer of discomfort. It would have been easy to doctor some footage to make us believe we were influencing the onscreen images with our minds, but that doesn't happen. Instead, we see the real thing.

This is at least partially supposed to be about a cursed video, which is mostly why I wanted to watch it at all, since horror movies about cursed videos are possibly my favorite kind of horror movies. But this doesn't end up really being one of the central points of the film as a whole - yes, there is a video and there is a curse, but the fact that the curse is captured on video is secondary to what everything is about. I have few criticisms of this movie, but this is one slight one; it feels like the concept of the video being able to physically affect people is brought up early and then very quickly dropped. We see police officers commit suicide after being shown it, and we see people getting into a car crash after presumably seeing it, but the viral nature of the footage is never emphasized beyond that. I did not mind this too much, because the small, intimate scale of the cast who are involved in the story made it a better film, but I felt like the suicides and other related deaths had me geared up for this to pan out differently than it did.

The reason why I said that this was not an unfamiliar premise to me is because I've seen a lot of horror movies coming from southeast Asia (and some really terrible ones from America and the like) where the source of horror is the ostensibly Buddhist practices of some small, backwater community. I'm not usually a fan of these kinds of things because it feels like at heart all they're saying is that smaller, often syncretic religions practiced in rural areas are frightening and not to be trusted, in contrast with organized religion, which is supposedly fine. But the visual language Incantation uses to present its concept - though said concept may basically be the same "remote village with a freaky patron god" thing - is far different from the trite, sometimes elitist views I've gotten used to.

This movie is really dedicated to making the shrines, relics, and general locale look authentic and believable as a part of Buddhism. Very, very little here feels like it's deliberately scary. No upside-down crosses (or equivalent) or twigs Blair Witched together into idols that everyone bows to. The lushness and vibrant color of Buddhist reliquaries and murals are depicted here in full glory, and aside from the final reveal in the statue room it doesn't look like anything you wouldn't actually see in a mural depicting scenes from Buddhist literature. I think that this plays into what I feel is the stance from which the film approaches religion. In showing us imagery that is not altered to be more frightening than it would be in real life, Incantation is not creating a sect of evil worshippers but instead making the point that the way a devotee interprets their religion changes its entire meaning. And at one point the main character does attempt to consult the "good" side of Buddhism as a desperate attempt to save herself and her daughter, but the things the master says she has to go through for a shot at redemption are so difficult that the difference between "normal" worship and the warped practices of the cursed village seem very similar.

There is a question I kept coming up with that can also extend beyond this and into other religious horror films as well: Is it more frightening to be worshipping the wrong thing, or to not be worshipping the right thing hard enough? To that end, in this film, where did the instructions for how to pray, how to devote, how to decorate the shrines and set up the icons come from? Were they cobbled together by the people in an attempt to pacify and please a deity they're all afraid of, or were they handed down from some external force with the promise of prosperity attached? Were the people promised salvation and blessings if they just continued to keep the faith, at any cost? Or are they searching for those blessings themselves? The line between what we would consider "acceptable" religion and something dark and sinister is thin and often permeable. That is the fear at the heart of Incantation - that all worship has the potential to go bad, not just worship of a specific and identifiably evil deity.

The one other issue I had with this that didn't occur to me until I was trying to fall asleep afterwards is that the monk in Yunnan who the main character's friend seeks out to translate the sutras could have essentially saved everyone's life but instead is just used as this monk ex machina, serving only to explain, not to influence. I guess that's pretty monkish of him, but this one guy or his younger interpreter could have raised more of a fuss upon being approached by an exhausted-looking man from very far away who asks him to translate a bunch of evil-sounding words and maybe not as many people would have died.

Aside from that, though, and a little disappointment that they went full-frontal in revealing the statue at the end, it's pretty rare for me to have so few actual complaints about a film. The human side of things felt almost uncomfortably real, and instead of detracting from the scary bits, I was compelled by the underlying story about a struggling single mother trying her damnedest to recover from what she was wrapped up in so that she could be the best parent for her daughter, who she clearly loved. Even the inclusion of the daughter's carer from the foster home she was brought to after the state took her and his deep, genuine love for her felt real. This is a movie that's equal on all sides, establishing characters who you care about and a terrifying horror story. The visual scares are equally as disconcerting as your growing awareness that everybody you're watching, no matter how much you want them to pull through, is doomed. There's something really interesting and fresh here, and I hope that this director will continue to come out with horror films that feel this original instead of recycling tropes.