Incantation (2022)
★★½ — Incantation (2022)
There's a moment about twenty minutes into Incantation where the dread just creeps up on you quietly, no jump, no sting on the soundtrack, just a wrong image held a beat too long. That's the film at its best. And the frustrating thing is, that version of the film is genuinely good. It's just buried under almost two hours of material that could've been trimmed to ninety minutes without losing a single thing that matters.
This is Taiwan's entry on my A-Z World Movie Tour, and I was genuinely excited for it. The premise pulls you in straight away: a woman is trying to break a curse she unknowingly brought down on her young daughter after she violated a forbidden religious ritual. There's grief wrapped around that set-up, and real guilt, and the found-footage format early on gives it an intimate, queasy texture. The cultural folklore at the heart of it feels specific and strange in the best way, rooted in something that doesn't play by Western horror's rules. When the film leans into that strangeness, it earns its scares.
But found footage lives or dies by its discipline, and Incantation loses its grip on that discipline badly by the midpoint. I kept thinking of The Blair Witch Project, which understood that restraint is the whole game: what you don't show is scarier than what you do, and keeping it short keeps the tension wound tight. Incantation doesn't trust that. It repeats itself, cycles back through footage and flashbacks and explanations until the atmosphere it worked so hard to build just... deflates. The constant handheld work stops feeling immersive and starts feeling like a chore. Your eyes get tired before your nerves do.
There are genuine highlights. Some of the imagery gets properly under your skin, eerie and particular and culturally specific in a way that makes it feel fresh. The emotional core of the mother-daughter relationship gives the film more weight than your average found-footage horror, and there are moments where those two things, the dread and the love, come together effectively. The ending, too, goes somewhere properly dark and unnerving. I'll give it that.
But then there's a whole lot of loud bangs and sudden faces between those highlights. Jump scares are fine as punctuation, but here they start to feel like they're papering over gaps, like the film doesn't quite trust the quieter, stranger material to carry the load. And some of the character decisions in the middle stretch are the kind that make you want to shout at the screen, not in an engaged way, but in a frustrated, why-are-you-doing-that way that pushes you further out of the story rather than pulling you deeper in.
Taiwan has form for unsettling, folklore-driven horror that really gets under your skin, and Incantation has flashes of exactly that. But flashes aren't enough across a runtime this long. It's sporadically powerful and occasionally properly creepy, and there's clearly craft behind it. The problem is the craft doesn't extend to the edit. It's a film with more ambition than payoff, and as a viewing experience I found it more exhausting than frightening.
Two and a half stars. Worth a look if you're a found-footage devotee or you're drawn to horror that takes its folklore seriously. Just don't go in expecting the tension to hold all the way through, because it won't.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2025-09-11
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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