Fantasia 2020 Review: Detention, A Monstrous History Goes Bump In The Night
Note: this contains spoilers for Detention
The short synopsis you read when you look up Detention on Wikipedia is a little misleading: “..a boy and a girl are trapped alone at their hillside high school at midnight”. It evokes the idea of some sort of haunted house situation where the protagonists likely have to make it until morning if there is any hope of survival. While there is some element of haunted house like situations, it would be better described as a sort of meandering nightmare-scape where reality and imagination are constantly blurred, the morning won’t save anyone - if it comes at all, and survival is unlikely.
The film is set in 1962 Taiwan at the invented Greenwood Highschool during the White Terror era and when martial law is in full force. Books, films, and music were banned at even the hint of a communist message, and ‘perpetrators’ were arrested, tortured, and often killed by officers with impunity. The storyline is adapted from a video game of the same name, and the video game aesthetic is prevalent from the first frame. The otherworldly greyness in particular is reminiscent of Silent Hill (2006), another game to movie adaptation.
The film is broken up into three chapters: The Nightmare, The Whistle Blower, and The Ones Who Live. At the start, we follow Fang Ray-shin (Gingle Wang) and Wei Chong-ting (Tseng Chin-hua) as they explore the halls of their dilapidated school trying to find a way out or anyone else who might be there with them. Wei is part of a secret book club that reads and transcribes banned books, and Fang is the girl he likes, but apart from that, in the first chapter, it is hard to know exactly what is going on. Characters appear and disappear, rooms change beyond doorways, and something in chains is stalking the halls as bits of story come at you in a seemingly random fashion. However, the visuals are interesting enough to keep you watching. The lighting and set design are particularly impressive, as are the moments of isolated sound. I may never get the sound of Fang’s creaking shoes out of my head.
The film picks up in the second chapter which focuses mostly on Fang and her backstory, and there is no doubt that Gingle Wang is the stand out of the cast, she goes from wide-eyed school girl to dark intentions with the turn of a head; the film benefits whenever she is on screen. I also have to give a special shout out to Hung Chang Chu who plays Inspector Bai, a high up in the military police and the embodiment of the law at Greenwood Highschool, whose mere presence is truly terrifying. The third and final chapter ties everything up nicely, but honestly left me wishing we had spent more of the film with the characters in their ‘real’ world.
Overall, it is about two things: desire and guilt. The desire for a person, for knowledge, for freedom. And guilt about things said and done that cannot be taken back. It’s a glimpse into a truly terrifying time in Taiwanese history. There are a few computer-generated scary things in the film which I feel detract from the story rather than add to it, as they are not consistent enough to pose a continuous threat. There are also a couple of truly gross and bloody scenes that definitely made me wince, but, if you’re looking for a straight up horror film, scares’n’all, this is probably not for you.
The looming threat is martial law and the real spectres are the military police who enforce it. You don’t really need CGI monsters when there is an ever-present promise of violence; in your home, in your school, even if you’re just a child and your only crime is reading. The history should have been the horror here, and even though I was left unsettled, I was mostly left wanting more.
Detention was reviewed as part of our coverage of Fantasia 2020.
Isaura Barbé-Brown is a Hackney born and based actress. She studied at AADA in New York and BADA in Oxford. She has done talks at the BFI for their Squad Goals event and with the Bechdel Test Fest on race in romantic films. She has also been on panels for BFI Future Film, The Watersprite Film Festival and The Norwich Film Festival. Isaura’s acting work covers theatre, film, tv and voiceover. She has also written short film scripts and plays as well as short stories and poetry.
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