In the Flesh: Incantation (Patreon)

It’s not often I need to pull a blanket over my bare legs during a horror movie these days, that talismanic action any child can tell you is the difference between whatever’s under the bed getting its scabby claws around your ankles or not. By about twenty minutes into Kevin Ko’s Incantation my comforter was up to my chin and the prospect of getting out of bed, of so much as looking at my partially open bedroom door, filled me with paralyzing dread. Ko isn’t reinventing the wheel here — there are doors mysteriously opening, lights flickering, hallways shot at wide angles to make them appear bottomlessly long and yawning — but his seamless attention to detail ensures each genre convention he tackles feels fresh and startling. Every room is lived-in and unique, every public space simultaneously vibrant and run-down. In this vital context the parental anxieties and mental health struggles of recovered psychiatric patient Li Ronan (Tsai Hsuan-yen) as she reconnects with her young daughter Dodo (Huang Sin-ting) feel as clear and present as a loved one’s visible dysfunction.

The mother-daughter chemistry between the two actresses — fragile and anxious on Hsuan-yen’s end, confused and guarded on Sin-ting’s — is immediately electrifying. Watching a fragile connection bloom between the two imbues the film with a simultaneous sense of wonder and terror, a feeling that something rare and beautiful is about to bloom in front of us, and that it cannot possibly survive. The found footage structure of the film provides a frank and open form of intimacy heightened by Ronan’s repeated entreaties to the viewer to participate in prayer with her and to memorize facts and images she records. What might feel manipulative and cheap in lesser hands is in Ko’s a Blair Witch Project-league involvement of the audience in his project, creating a sense not just of responsibility but of complicity in the viewer as things begin to fly off the rails.

In stark opposition to the nascent bond between Ronan and Dodo is the source of the film’s instigating curse, the veiled statue of the Buddha-Mother in her sealed and warded temple. If Ronan struggles to give her child a life free of her own baggage, the Buddha-Mother regards all that comes within her sight as delicacies to be considered and plucked at whim from passing trays. There is no distinction to her monstrous divinity between children and sustenance, worship and terror. It is the shadow on the wall to Ronan’s choice to bring Dodo back into her orbit, the ur-mother squatting in her bloody hole in the side of a hill, hungering for the unborn child brought to her doorstep by three foolish young people in a fit of high spirits. It’s Ripley and the alien queen, only wading through spiritual syrup every step of their fight, and with no powered exoskeleton to even the playing field. In the shadow of the Buddha-Mother Ko captures that rarest cinematic feeling, and for a moment forces us to experience true awe.