This seems to have been a commercially successful film and the directorial debut of John Tsu. Its source material is a horror video game by a Taiwanese director and its premise is undoubtedly strong, being about students and teachers living during Taiwan’s White Terror period. Telling a story about political repression within the horror genre seems at first like a stroke of genius. But then it quickly becomes obvious why this is rarely attempted. The real event is such a weighty tragedy that the supernatural elements cannot help but feel farcical in comparison. Then there’s how the director plays up the horror imagery so blatantly, perhaps in order to be faithful to the video game, when a lighter touch would have been more effective. I really wanted to like this, but it’s much of a mixed bag to be considered actually good.

Model student Fang Ray Shin wakes up at her desk in a classroom one evening with no recollection of what happened. She finds the school transformed into a nightmarish version of its usual state and sees apparitions out of the corners of her eyes. She runs into another student Wei Chung Ting and they try to escape the school together but find the way out cut by a raging flood of water. As they retreat and try to work out what is going on, memories return to the two of them. Wei is a member of a secret book club run by two of the teachers in which they study books that have been banned by the government. The ghosts the two encounter relate that the club has been betrayed and its members executed. Fang in turn has a crush on the male teacher Chang Ming Hui who helps run the club. While they are chased around by a monstrous version of the military officers who enforce discipline in the school, it becomes obvious that they are trapped in some kind of purgatory and being punished for their sins.

With sightings of ghosts with blank faces, torn out eyes, bloody wounds and much more, Detention leaves no room for any doubt whatsoever that it wants to be a horror film. There’s some shock value in the jump scares and creepy imagery at first but to me it’s too much, too blatant and too fake looking to have any effect. The giant officer chasing after them is obviously a video game monster and the duo Fang and Wei even commit the annoying mistake of constantly looking backwards in terror while they run. As a horror film, I’d say this is subpar. It piles on too many effects with little thematic consistency between them, it constantly falls back on old tropes and the CGI isn’t even good quality. Most of it, the plot seems to be leaning heavily on a couple of key twists and they simply weren’t twists for us as it’s trivial to infer what is going on the first time something supernatural happens onscreen. I’m honestly not certain what the director’s intentions for the audience are. Are they supposed to play along and pretend to be shocked or something? It’s all so silly, especially since the characters themselves at times seem to know that they aren’t in the real world any longer.

I do like that this film draws attention to the White Terror period and the cloud of repression society had to live under, barraged by propaganda and subject at any time to intrusive searches and investigations. It’s no wonder that this wasn’t released in China even though the subject is purely about Taiwan’s own history. Yet this aspires only to be a horror film and isn’t a historical film at all. As such it tells you nothing about what really happened and why. It feels ridiculous to me that teachers and students are being executed for reading the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore but who knows, maybe it really happened. A cursory reading of the incident suggests to me that teachers and students were killed for organizing Communist cells and resisting being conscripted into the security forces. This film refuses even to name the Kuomintang and seems to be reluctant to portray the teachers and students as being in opposition to the government. If you’re fighting for freedom and democracy in a dictatorship, then yes, you are opposed to the government and should be proud of it!

It’s great that this horror film has a more substantial theme than the usual grudges or clueless teenagers wandering into trouble. It’s great that this film wants to shed light on a particular tragedy that most of the world knows little about. Yet it uses history only as a backdrop and its emotional highs rely instead on the usual high school tropes of students and teachers having crushes to attract viewers. It feels so silly and juvenile when set next to the weight of real history. On top of it all, it’s not even a very good horror film being crudely made. It’s better than most other horror films, sure, but that’s all it is.