Based on the 2017 video game of the same name, Detention is the directorial debut of Taiwanese filmmaker, John Hsu. Taking place in 1962, at the height of the “White Terror,” a period of political turmoil and martial law that resulted in thousands being killed due to their opposition – or perceived opposition – to Kuomintang aka the Chinese Nationalist Party. Any material that went against the views of the government were banned, and anyone seen with outlawed literature were taken, and sentenced for treason. It was a dark period, and it serves as the backdrop for the story that Hsu and his co-writers, Fu Kai-ling and Chien Shi-keng, are trying to explore.
The film proper follows two young students, Fang Ray Shin (Gingle Wang) and Wei Chong-Ting (Jing-Hua Tseng). We first see a bit of them in their everyday life at school, which is very strict. However, two teachers, Miss Yin (Cecilia Choi) and Mr. Zhang (Fu Meng-Po) pass around copies of banned literature to curious students in a secret group. But there’s a betrayal, and before we even know what happened, we find our characters in the school at night, with little memory of how they got there or why. The place is also nothing like how it was, looking decrepit, like something out of a nightmare.
The students go looking for Mr. Zhang, or really anybody who could help, but they find themselves meeting ghostly figures, strange versions of people they know, and a tall monster with a lantern wearing a military uniform and a mirror for a face. In between all these supernatural bits, we’ll cut back to life back at the school and the students and teachers dealing with all the restrictions under martial law. We get glimpses and hints of what’s to come, slowly revealing the truth behind what ultimately happened with the secret group and the teachers who passed banned material.
The film balances a lot of different vibes, going from atmospheric haunted house ride to political thriller to coming-of-age drama to teen romance, it covers a lot of ground, and it comes across fairly ambitious as a result. I don’t know how faithful or unfaithful it is to the video game, though you could definitely feel certain sections feeling like a direct translation of the experience you would have in something like Outlast, especially in those early scenes where the students wander the school in the dark.
The film doesn’t give a ton of context as to what exactly led to the White Terror and what it is their whole system and beliefs are about, but it ultimately works as a universal story about fascism and systems of power oppressing people, and how some people could unwittingly play with the system for their own selfish purpose and ruin things for others in the process. And I imagine there is some sense of reckoning at play for Taiwanese audiences, who are forced to confront some horrific imagery, and I’m not even referring to the actual supernatural stuff, which is already fairly eerie and creepy.
With Detention, Hsu’s direction is pretty slick and shows a real love for horror. For a directorial debut, it’s fairly strong work as a whole. I can see how the structure might not work for some as it jumps back and forth between the past and this nightmare world in a way that is purposefully disorienting and sometimes the way information is revealed is not immediately clear until later in the film when further context is given. However, it does have quite the impact once it becomes clear what exactly has happened and why, and there’s plenty of nuance involved to make the themes more complex than one would initially imagine in a film like this. It is definitely one of the better video game movies out there, honestly probably the only good one aside from the also recent Werewolves Within, and it’s also a great showcase for a period of history that we don’t often see in film, reminding us that the greatest horrors are not in the monsters we make up, but the ones that are out there in the real world, and I think there’s a lot of value in that.
Detention is now out in select theaters and virtual cinemas.