Fantasia Festival 2020 Film Review: Detention

Film

Aug 27

Detention’s Lackluster Horror Elements Sink a Gripping History Lesson

Deeper and more pensive than your average video game adaptation, John Hsu’s Detention aims to shine a revealing light on a violent and oft-ignored time period in Taiwanese history. A love story, a horror movie, and a political thriller all wrapped up in a single package, the film delivers a stirring history lesson and an incisive commentary on the evils of authoritarianism, but its fractured and ride-the-rails ghost story does it no favors. Minor spoilers ahead…

Taiwan’s “White Terror” period, one of the longest instances of martial law in history, typically sits within the hushed murmurs of the taboo, especially when it comes to mainstream depictions. Films such as Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness are two arthouse examples that deftly address the subject matter, but when it comes to a broader public consciousness, this period of national trauma remains mostly unexplored. Unexplored, that is, until 2017’s hit video game, Detention. While the 2D survival horror side-scroller has a reputation of terrifying its players, it also educates its audience about the era in which Taiwan’s governing Kuomintang party imprisoned over 140,000 political “enemies” between 1947 and 1987, ruling with an iron-fisted blanket of censorship and surveillance. Taiwanese filmmaker John Hsu, in his directorial debut, attempts to further bridge this populist gap in public awareness with his film adaptation of the same name. Historical reckoning entwined with nightmarish horror, Detention is an uneven narrative that shines when it focuses on the real-life terrors of authoritarian control, but sags when it falls back on its digital source material.

For those unfamiliar with the game, the first act of Detention can be a little discombobulating. Opening with a sunlit prologue and a stirring voiceover, the film introduces us to Wei Chung-ting (Tseng Ching-hua), a teenager attending Greenwood High School in 1960s Taiwan. Walking into school single-file, he locks eyes with his crush Fang Ray-shin (Gingle Wang) and saves a contraband-carrying classmate from the scrutiny of Inspector Bai (Chu Hung-chang), the facility’s oppressive military superintendent. Unbeknownst to most at the school, Wei is a member of a secret club - a group of dissident students and teachers that pass around forbidden leftist literature in an abandoned supply closet. With tinges of nostalgia, this opening scene is reminiscent of your standard historical drama-slash-tragedy, but Detention quickly takes a dark and supernatural detour. Jarringly and without much fanfare, we’re plunged into a flash-forward hellscape: Inexplicably, Wei and Fang wake up to a dark, deserted, and warped version of their school where demons roam the hallways, and faceless specters in KMT caps kill whatever humans are left without mercy.

Fantasia-Film-Festival-2020-Film-Review-Detention-2.jpg — “Historical reckoning entwined with nightmarish horror, *Detention* is an uneven narrative that shines when it focuses on the real-life terrors…but sags when falls back on its digital source material.”

These are the parallel narratives that Detention strives to build: As Wei and Fang piece together the secrets behind their new nightmare setting and the monsters that dwell within it, a picture of the “real world” also begins to form. In a series of flashbacks, the fate of Wei’s revolutionary club is slowly revealed - a fate characterized by furtive romance, sudden betrayal, brutal torture, and shocking executions. And it’s here where the narrative is brightest. In addition to the strong character work that sells how vital the ideals of freedom are within the confines of authoritarian internment, there’s an air of paranoia and danger that’s as palpable as any top-tier suspense thriller, and we get a genuine feel for how perilous these dissident activities are. Moments of tenderness and deft historical commentary are punctuated with bouts of pure terror: Students and teachers found trafficking in contraband and banned literature are dragged away screaming by the KMT, either tortured or executed, and never to be heard from again.

Detention makes it perfectly clear that the villains of the story are all too real, and perhaps this is the film’s biggest problem. With its depiction of real-life horrors, there’s sparse utility to the narrative’s supernatural aspects, which aren’t very strong to begin with. Yes, there is mood and atmosphere in Wei and Fang’s investigation of their new surroundings, but compared to the vicious weight of KMT rule, there just isn’t that much to justify its CGI ghoulies. It also doesn’t help that Detention’s horror elements are quite uninspired, characterized by loud noises and cheap tropes instead of capitalizing on director of photography Chou Yi-Hsien’s spooky ambience. In the end, it’s quite clear that this flash-forwards segment rides along the rails of the video game, where our protagonists jump from clue to clue and uncover a mystery in the most perfunctory of ways. Detention’s big reveal, however, is quite clever and makes the time spent in this demonic purgatory at least somewhat worthwhile - the film’s endgame and the harrowing truth behind the terrifying netherworld unfolds a compelling allegory for the culture of silence around Taiwan’s darkest times. It’s just a shame that half of the journey to get there is so lackluster.

There’s a spirituous throughline in Detention that tackles guilt, remembrance, and redemption for a muted period in Taiwanese history, and for a video game adaptation, the film is more powerful than it has any right to be. With the historical drama portion of his directorial debut, it’s evident that John Hsu is capable of spinning layered and affecting storytelling; by combining engaging characters with gripping suspense, there’s a lot to love about Detention, but the way the film is beholden to its video game roots saps its strength. Those looking for a full meal of horror or an elevation of the film’s digital counterpart will likely be disappointed, but for fans of historical drama and suspense thrillers, there’s a lot to admire and digest. Even though Hsu’s freshman effort is uneven with its ability to split its narrative effectively, I’m extremely eager to see what comes next for the director.