Be careful when you go hunting ghosts, you just might find one, and it might ruin your life. You might even find a demon goddess, as did the hapless ghost hunters in 2022's Incantation (咒). There's some real ambition in this movie, especially in its world building, that sets it apart from more typical found footage horror films. However, the film is mostly padded with jump scares and build-up to jump scares and doesn't quite amount to the psychological feast it promises at the beginning. Still, it's fun.
The story is presented out of sequence. We meet the protagonist, Li Ronan (Tsai Hsuan-yen), as she's just regaining custody of her daughter, Dodo (Huang Sin-ting). Slowly we're given information about Li Ronan's past, why she'd lost custody of Dodo, and what it has to do with her former career as a TV ghost hunter.
The very beginning of the film presents the viewer with some optical illusions--one of an animated ferris wheel, the other of a moving train. Li Ronan, in narration, tells us how our interpretation of the moving images determines our perception of them. It's possible to see the ferris wheel or the train moving left or right, depending, she says, on our intention. From there, one might expect the film to be largely about the ambiguity as to how much our intentions influence the events in our lives. In fact, though, the film is mostly about how much an omnipotent demon goddess can influence our lives.
But she's a pretty cool demon goddess. She's called "Mother-Buddha" and much of the ritual and iconography surrounding her seems to be nightmare distortions of Buddhism and Hinduism. The filmmakers put together statues, altars, and rituals that have a nice feeling of authenticity.
Some of the things that happen to Li Ronan's daughter just made me feel sad rather than scared. But mostly this movie is a fun haunted house.
Incantation is available on Netflix.
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