Incantation

I love found footage horror movies. Yes, I know a lot of them suck, but I also love the ones that suck. I can’t explain it. There’s just something inherently novel about the format that I never get tired of.

Incantation is a 2022 Taiwanese horror movie that can’t decide whether it’s found footage or not. Sometimes—a lot of the time—it definitely is, being composed of first-person camera footage of someone experiencing a spooky event.

Other times it’s more like a “mockumentary”, jumping between different footage sources (camera footage, recorded facetime calls, conveniently-placed CCTVs) and complete with documentary-esque flourishes like enhanced replays with accompanying text. But unlike with most mockumentaries, no explanation is given for who edited the video together like this, never mind how they got their hands on it (quite a lot of it is implied to have been left in a location where it would be very unlikely to be found). Oh, and there’s a late-movie conceit where I guess the whole thing was meant to be some kind of livestream, which makes absolutely no sense.

Then sometimes the movie just says “fuck it” and stops following the camera POV entirely. And the whole thing, including the found footage parts, have frequent non-diagetic music.

You might be gathering from all of this that Incantation is a little scattershot, and you would be right. But first, what’s it about?

Shortly after giving birth to her first child, Li Ronan (no relation) put the baby up for adoption, due to suffering from psychosis that made her believe she was being assailed by malevolent supernatural forces. Now it’s six years later, she’s all better, and the courts have granted her custody of her daughter, Dodo. Problem: Dodo has no idea who Li is and considers the dude who ran the foster home she grew up in to be her father. Also problem: weird shit starts happening as soon as Dodo enters Li’s apartment, which starts to quickly erode Li’s stringent “no believing in malevolent supernatural forces” policy.

(I’m aware that Taiwanese naming conventions mean the character’s first name is Ronan, but typing that made me feel like I was talking about myself in third person, which felt weird).

That’s one strand of the movie’s plot. The other strand cuts back to six years earlier, when Li, her boyfriend Dom, and Dom’s dipshit cousin visited an insular religious commune run by one of Dom’s uncles for their ghost-hunting Youtube channel. We know from Li’s present-day narration that she, Dom and Cousin Dipshit violated a taboo in the compound by entering some sort of tunnel, and naturally these flashbacks lead up to that fateful moment.

Found footage movies have a reputation for being extreme slow burns. The template as laid down by The Blair Witch Project and then codified by Paranormal Activity involves a slow, gradual ramp-up of conveniently low-budget ghost effects, until eventually everything reaches a climax and you get one scene of clear, out-and-out horror.

Incantation doesn’t have time for that. Very obvious supernatural events begin occurring basically the moment Dodo crosses the threshold of Li’s apartment, with her first night involving the kinds of things the traditional found footage formula saves for just before the climax, and Li and Dom’s trip to the commune six years ago also involved a bunch of buck-wild shit happening even before people started dying.

You may have noticed a bit of a problem here: Li is supposed to have thought (and everyone else agrees) that she was mentally ill after Dodo’s birth, and yet she has a camera full of footage proving that spooky stuff (not to mention highly illegal stuff, including attempted child sacrifice) happened during her time in the cult compound. Easy solution: just say the camera got destroyed or lost.

Well, no, that doesn’t work, because the camera contains plot-critical information that will later be shown to the audience. More difficult solution: say the camera footage got corrupted, so then one of the characters can later download software from a “foreign website” that un-corrupts it. That… works, although it’s messy and obviously contrived.

Except Li also films supernatural shit in the present day, on a very much non-corrupted camera. Why can’t she use this to prove that she’s not crazy when the government starts talking about taking Dodo away? Because then the movie’s plot wouldn’t work.

If you eliminated the found footage conceit—which, remember, the movie doesn’t stick with consistently anyway—all of these problems would go away. Li couldn’t show other people what’s happening in her apartment because the human eye doesn’t record footage, we wouldn’t need this convoluted business with mysterious foreign software because normal movies can just cut to flashbacks without explanation, the movie wouldn’t have to deploy bizarre Youtuber setups with people pointing cameras at videos playing on laptop screens in order to convey information to the audience. The found footage angle adds very little to the movie, while tying its hands and legs behind its back.

The other consequence of this omniscient semi-found footage approach is that the movie as a whole is choppy, frequently jumping over ambiguous stretches of time in order to paper over plot developments (not including the cuts from past to present, which I was fine with). This is especially the case in the movie’s last third, which gets extremely unfocused, to an almost feverish extent. All of this means that the movie resembles less a coherent narrative and more a compilation of someone’s cool ideas for individual horror scenes.

Now, to be fair, a lot of those horror scenes are really cool. We’ve got well-executed classic haunted house stuff, freaky cult infiltration reminiscent of that one really good segment from VHS, people stuck in temporal/spatial loops, even some scenes that get into quasi-zombie movie territory. All of this is wrapped up in a plot about insular little communities worshipping malevolent entities that might or might not be the gods they perceive them as, which is delightfully Silent Hill-coded.

I just wish those cool elements were embedded in a well-written and well-paced plot, ideally with a more compelling main character (Li spends most of the movie playing the whole “weepy hysterical horror mom” trope to the hilt).