Review | Detention film review: Taiwan’s White Terror evoked in adaptation of fantasy horror video game

Gingle Wang Ching and Tseng Jing-hua star in horror film set amid era of political repression in Taiwan

The film, by John Hsu Han-chiang, won the best new director and best adapted screenplay prizes at the Golden Horse film awards

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Gingle Wang Ching in a still from Detention (category: IIB; Mandarin), directed by John Hsu Han-chiang. Tseng Jing-hua and Fu Meng-po co-star.

Published: 5:00pm, 2 Dec 2019Updated: 5:12pm, 2 Dec 2019

2/5 stars

The atrocities of Taiwan’s White Terror, a period of political repression, provide the chilling backdrop for John Hsu Han-chiang’s high-school horror film, for which he won the best new director and best adapted screenplay prizes at this year’s Golden Horse film awards.

Adapted from the side-scroller video game of the same name, Detention interweaves high school romance with fantastical scares, as a group of revolutionary teens risk their lives in 1962 to study literary works banned by the vicious Kuomintang (KMT) authorities.

Divided into three distinct chapters, “Nightmare”, “The Whistleblower”, and “The Ones Who Lived”, the film slowly reveals its mystery as classmates Fang (Gingle Wang Ching) and Wei (Tseng Jing-hua) navigate their dilapidated school during a violent storm.

Wei is infatuated with Fang, but she only has eyes for Mr. Zhang (Fu Meng-po), the handsome young school counsellor who runs their illicit book club. It soon becomes apparent that the grotesque creatures roaming the halls are figurative representations of the palpable threat personified by school administrator Bai (Yun Chung-yueh).

Fang escapes the authoritarian rule of martial law in much the same way Guillermo del Toro’s young heroine conjured a fantasy kingdom in Pan’s Labyrinth to avoid dealing with the horrors of the Spanish civil war.