Mark Reviews Movies: DETENTION (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 7, 2021

To learn that Detention, an atmospheric and narratively complex piece of political horror, is based on a video game is to be left with only one shocked question: This is seriously based on a video game? Obviously, the technology and aims of that interactive medium have evolved over the decades. We shouldn't be stunned that one could be adapted into a film as serious, imaginative, and thought-provoking as this one is in its best moments. Considering how low the bar of game-to-movie adaptations has been set, though, the realization of the source material here is still a surprise.

In retrospect, some of the elements of Chien Shih-Keng, Fu Kai-Ling, and director John Hsu's screenplay feel a bit game-like: the general movement from level to level, the hunting for clues, and our protagonists being chased by a menacing monster. None of that matters in the moment, because Hsu and his team have crafted a smart, emotionally and psychologically sound, and chilling story. That matters above all else for the filmmakers. Everything that happens here—even those more game-like moments—flows from the central concept.

There's a bit of regret in knowing and revealing the source material here, because decades of lazy, unimaginative, and pandering video game adaptations have created such a bias against them. Try to forget that fact, and for this critic's part, the references to it will stop now.

The story is set during the so-called "White Terror" period in Taiwan, during which a far right-wing government invoked martial law to maintain its power and dictated severe punishment to anyone perceived as subverting that power. Until fairly recent history, this was the longest sustained timeframe of martial law. More than 100,000 people were imprisoned and several thousand were executed under this authoritarian regime.

This specific story takes place in 1962—15 years into that period. It's set primarily within a high school within some unnamed town or city. Sometimes, the school is real, as in a prologue, in which we see students dressed in uniforms—the boys in military-type ones and the girls in matching skirts and blouses—being randomly searched, marching the halls in lockstep, and gathering in a courtyard around the country's flag, singing an anthem of discomforting nationalism.

Most of the time, though, the school is something else entirely—a nightmare, a kind of hell or purgatory, and/or a supernatural prison from which there is no physical or metaphysical escape. The road outside its gates has been washed away by a roaring river, and the forest just beyond the property line is guarded by a towering foe, which also haunts the halls looking for enemies of the state or those who fail to report them.

It's a giant beast, with long and jagged fingers, hulking legs, and a head, adorned with a military cap, that would seem human, if not for the fact that its face has been replaced by a mirror. One looks into it, as the monster chokes the life out of a "subversive," and sees, not some horrific visage, but oneself—the perceived enemy of the authority the creature represents and the warnings of which it speaks.

Fang Ray-Shin (Gingle Wang) awakens in this nightmare/hell/prison—of her mind or of someone else's or of some afterlife or all of these things at once—with no memory of what has happened. The school is apparently empty, as the day as turned to an unceasingly rainy night, and Fang wanders the halls, looking for fellow students or teachers or anyone else. At first, she can only find a haunting, spectral figure that looks like an ordinary schoolgirl, except that her face is melting. Eventually, she does find Wei Chung-ting (Tseng Jing-Hua), a classmate who also has no memory of whatever occurred to leave them alone here.

The general mystery—of what happened to everyone else—becomes fairly clear as flashes of memories return to the teens, who were part of a secret book club run by art teacher Mr. Chang (Fu Meng-Po) and music instructor Miss Yin (Cecilia Choi), but that doesn't mean there aren't specific shocks and more intimately tragic revelations to be uncovered as the story progresses. The club specialized in reading and copying banned books, in order to preserve them for a free future. Inspector Bai (Chu Hung-Chang), a military official in charge of the school, found out about the group somehow.

The rest of the plot splits and fragments—into flashbacks of Fang's home life, as well as her crush on the compassionate art teacher, and scenes of Fang and Wei looking deeper into the mystery of the person who gave up the book club to Bai. Wei's awareness re-awakens to what happened to him before losing consciousness. A character has to confront the burlap sack-covered heads, hanging corpses, and other murdered bodies—posed and applauded in the school auditorium—that haunt the conscience.

Hsu is adept at transitioning the mood here from generic—but evocative—gloom and doom toward something far more intimate and tragic. There are moments of grotesque violence, juxtaposed with ordinary reality (a book, for example, being removed from a neck wound and the same book simply being handed over to someone), that turn mundane betrayals into visceral, disturbing death sentences.

The horror of Detention resonates. That's not only because of its historical and political foundation. It's also because the film delves into the terror and torment of a guilty mind and/or soul.

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