Parent-child relationships show up a lot in horror movies. I mean, they also show up in dramas and comedies and martial arts films about the important of kindness and connection (seriously, go see Everything Everywhere All At Once if you haven’t yet, it’s great), but if you’re trying to evoke anxiety or dread or fear, putting a parent’s child in danger is a pretty effective way to do that. Every now and then you’ll get a film like The Omen or The Brood or Hereditary where the parent-child relationship is the horror, but even then it’s poking at the same nerve, just with a differently-shaped needle.
One of the ways this plays out is by examining the lengths to which a parent will go to protect their child, and Zhou (Incantation) is a reasonably solid addition to that particular piece of the puzzle. It’s a little jumbled to start with, but it finds its way home in the end.
We begin with a collection of what appear to be home movies shot on phone cameras, and a voiceover asking us whether or not we believe in blessings - in the idea that our intentions can actually change outcomes, whether it’s wishing someone a happy birthday or safe travels, things like that. The voice argues that intentions do change outcomes, that our wishes have an effect. The voice belongs to Ronan Li, and she’s making a video because her daughter Dodo is very sick, and she’s trying to reach as many people as possible, to ask for our blessings, our good wishes. Her daughter is being harmed by the result of a mistake Ronan made six years ago, a mistake that resulted in a curse. If we watch the video, our good wishes can help Dodo get better, but there’s a catch: Watching the video might be dangerous to us, so we need to protect ourselves by fixing a holy symbol in our memory and reciting a protective chant.
The curse has a very long reach.
What follows is something that isn’t found-footage, exactly. It’s more like a mockumentary where the framing device is that we’re watching a video made by Ronan as…a warning? A plea for help? Both?...and the story is largely (though not exclusively) presented as footage collected from different sources - camcorders, phones, laptops, surveillance cameras, etc. In that sense it’s reminiscent of films like
Noroi or
Occult, presented as curated footage that documents something supernatural. It’s a little distracting when it breaks the conceit to show something from a conventional third-person perspective, but in general the storytelling is strong enough that it doesn’t become too disruptive, and it becomes a critical piece of the story by the end. When the film proper opens, Ronan has undergone inpatient treatment at a mental hospital after suffering severe trauma following a trip that she took with her boyfriend Dom and Dom’s cousin Yuan. They ran a paranormal investigation show called Ghost Busters (no relation to the New York-based Ghostbusters, presumably) and they were investigating a legend from the village where Dom grew up about a tunnel that must never be entered. We don’t find out right away exactly what happened, but whatever it was, Ronan took years to get over it, but she’s doing a lot better now, has a job and a home, and we join her as she’s regaining custody of Dodo, who has spent the last few years in foster care.
So Ronan and Dodo get settled in, and right away things get weird. The film starts off strong with the curse’s evidence presented in striking fashion, going briskly from tragic coincidence to something more inexplicable over the course of the first two acts, but once the table is set, the decision to tell the story in what is largely a non-linear fashion dilutes the potential impact somewhat. There are roughly three timelines here - there’s the present, as Ronan is making the video, there’s the recent past, as she’s regained custody of Dodo and the proximal events that led up to the present, and there’s what happened six years before to incite all of this in the trip to the village. Part of the problem is that the time-jumps sometimes dilute the tension, another is that it’s not always immediately clear which timeline we’re watching right away. The end result is that the first two acts can be kind of confusing at times, which threatens to take us out of the movie.
Which is unfortunate, because the moments in the first two acts when it does work, work very well. The film gets a lot out of very small things - unexplained noises, objects falling over, things suddenly changing position, Dodo talking to people who aren’t there, stuff like that. None of it is especially novel, but it’s all executed well in the moment, and the idea that this is curated footage, not raw footage, makes the staging easier to believe. The segments at home are shot through the limited field of view and limited light of a camcorder, so they benefit from the inherent spookiness of a house in the middle of the night, the single light source barely holding its own against the shadows and what horrible revelations might lurk there. It's pretty strongly diegetic - the film doesn’t really use music apart from some ambient stings and chanting, but that’s about it. Moreover, unlike a lot of found-footage or quasi-found-footage films, it pays attention to the limits of its sources and knows when and how to use silent action effectively - there are segments where no sound is available but we get everything we need from the footage, and it’s more effective for it. The filmmakers also avoid the usual viewfinder-vision cliché and accomplish some very striking and impressive effects sequences without ever breaking the conceit. The cinematography is suitably all over the place, depending on the source, but the film generally gets a lot of mileage out of dark, grungy spaces fitfully lit from a very restricted field of view. And the segments from six years before work well too - the village they visit feels strange right from the get-go, and little bits of business in the background, barely glimpsed, do nothing to alleviate that. Whatever they stumbled into feels wrong, and their insistence on pushing further builds a lot of dread because it’s clear whatever is going to happen, it isn’t going to be good. The film keeps coming back to whatever happened that night throughout the film, getting closer and closer to the awful truth, saving the worst right before the very end. I think if there’d been a more consistent use of title cards or another way to signify which part of the story we were in at any given moment, it wouldn’t have been quite so confusing.
But this is much less of a problem in the third act, when we’ve got a pretty good idea (though not good enough, as the ending reveals) of what’s going on and what Ronan is faced with, and it feels much more cohesive. At this point, as things get worse and worse and it’s clear that they’re not going to get better, the supernatural elements are supplemented by Ronan’s harrowing experience as a mother watching her child get sicker and sicker and being helpless to do anything about it. She’s trying to do what’s best for her daughter, but the right thing is sometimes the hardest thing, and you agonize right along with her. I’m reminded in some ways of
The Exorcist, and Chris’ fruitless attempts to determine what’s wrong with Regan, while Regan clearly suffers. The ordering of things makes much more sense here, so even though there’s still bouncing back and forth in time, it’s easier to follow and so the dread that’s been there intermittently (though strongly for all of that) throughout really starts to build and sustain itself as the final pieces of the story fall into place.
It’s a movie about what a mother will do to ensure that her child is safe, healthy, and happy, the sacrifices that a mother will make to stand between her child and the predations of an implacable curse, and in this I see nods to
Ringu and
Dark Water in ways that riff on them without being blatant imitations, there’s even sort of a William Castle vibe to it in some ways that would absolutely spoil the film but give it a nice punch in an ending that might be a trifle overlong, but comes good on what it’s promised the whole time and leaves you with something indelible, as simultaneously inexplicable and awful as the end of
The Blair Witch Project. Between the people of the village, and Ronan, the film says that there are some things you do because you’re family, things that only your family can be responsible for, things that make you family whether you want to be or not, and things that family requires of you, and in this film they all exact a terrible cost.
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