Incantation (2022)

Kevin Ko's Incantation is a found footage curse delivery system, and a ruthlessly efficient one. The setup is spare: a mother named Li Ronan breaks a religious taboo in a mountain village, and six years later her daughter Dodo begins to rot from the inside. Ko spends his entire budget on dread, on runes blooming under skin, on a statute of a malevolent deity whose veiled face is the source of everyone's trouble. The cleverest move is recruiting the audience into the ritual, asking viewers to memorize an insignia and chant along until they realize they have signed the contract themselves.

We sifted this film for evidence of contemporary social consciousness and found the shelves bare. The Taiwanese cast plays Taiwanese characters in a Taiwanese production backed by a Taiwanese city film fund, which is a matter of provenance, not thesis. No LGBTQ+ material surfaces. No racial argument is made. Capital, class, and labor go unmentioned; the natural world appears only as fog and forest, holding no environmental grievance. No character wrestles with body image. No character carries a neurodivergent trait as a narrative device. The film borrows a real 2005 Kaohsiung case of family hysteria and treats it as atmospheric texture, with zero interest in rewriting the historical record for ideological purposes.

The single flicker of progressive sensibility is a mother at the center of the frame. She is the protagonist, but her maternal guilt and sacrificial logic are the engine of the genre, not a commentary on gender structures. Ronan lies to strangers, endangers her own child's caretakers, and ultimately broadcasts a curse onto the viewing public to buy her daughter a happy ending. That is not structural critique. That is a woman doing precisely what a haunted house demands. The direct address that runs through the film is a gimmick, not a sermon, and we should all be grateful for small mercies.