Incantation · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman looks into the lens and asks you for a favor. Her name is Li Ronan, her daughter is sick, and she needs you to memorize a symbol and repeat a phrase. She's warm about it. She repeats herself the way people do when they need you to actually listen, and Tsai Hsuan-yen plays it with the frayed patience of someone who has already asked a lot of strangers. Most of us said the words. That's the film: a woman asking, an audience agreeing, and a last reel that explains what was agreed to.

Kevin Ko's invention is narrow and exact. Found footage was old by 2022. The grammar of people filming their own destruction was settled by The Blair Witch Project, and the premise that a curse travels on recorded media was codified by Ringu twenty-four years earlier. What nobody had done was collapse the two audiences into one. In Ringu the cursed tape is inside the film and the people who watch it are characters. In Incantation the cursed footage is the film, and the people watching are us. The blessing Ronan teaches is the transmission vector. She isn't warning us. She's recruiting. Ko had made a zombie splatter picture before this; here he traded gore for architecture, and the architecture is a confidence trick.

Which is where Deleuze stops being decoration and starts being useful, because he wrote a long chapter about films made by forgers and refused to call them liars.

Consider the contract Ko breaks. Bazin argued that the photographic image carries something of its object across into the copy — the camera doesn't assert, it transfers — and that's why footage feels like testimony while a painting feels like a claim. Found footage lives entirely on that credit. Autofocus hunting, the timestamp burned into the corner, the underlit jostle down the tunnel toward the shrine: not failures of craft but proofs of authenticity, manufactured at volume. Even the "inspired by a true story" card is part of the rig, and the 2005 Kaohsiung case it gestures at is doing rhetorical work rather than documentary work.

Deleuze's counter-concept is what he called the powers of the false. Some films give up on being either truthful or deceptive and instead make truth something the film produces. His model was Welles, and his figure was the forger: not a con man but a creator whose medium is belief. Ronan is that figure, and Ko's hardest achievement is that her sincerity is not fake. The love for Dodo is real, the desperation is real, and they are the instrument. A monster would have been easier.

Then the edit, which is the film's finest tool and its actual antagonist. Incantation runs achronologically, braiding the present-tense rescue, the recorded trip to the family's rural house, and inserted evidence. Deleuze's name for a story that holds two incompatible versions as both true is falsifying narration. That is precisely the finale: the same material, reassembled, produces a second account that can't be reconciled with the first, and the film never withdraws the first. What the chant is was never a question of fact. It was a question of assembly. There's an even finer name for the chant itself, borrowed from Deleuze's earlier work on action: the index of equivocity, a gesture that could belong to either of two situations, with the situation left offscreen. Say it and you're shielding a child. Say it and you're spreading a curse. The sound is identical.

The sound is also where the film is deepest. Deleuze used crystalline description for images or words that compose their object and then take its place, so there's nothing behind the description to check it against. The incantation works like that. It's phonemes. Its referent doesn't exist anywhere but in the saying, which is why Ko puts it in your mouth rather than merely on the screen, and why the film gets stranger the second time. You know what the syllables do now. They do it anyway.

Two more moves, both rigorous. Ko withholds sight, keeping the supernatural in the grain and the shadow at the edge of legibility, so the image stops being something you watch and becomes something you decipher. Deleuze's term for that is the lectosign, the readable image, and Incantation is nearly a limit case: it holds a symbol up to the lens and tells you to read it. Meanwhile the soundtrack narrates what the picture won't. Whispered chanting with no visible mouth. Room tone thickening into presence. Voice cut loose from body. The horror is carried in that gap, and the darkness is what opens it.

The debts are unusually legible. Cannibal Holocaust invented recovered footage as moral compromise, watching as participation; Ko keeps the ethics and drops the atrocity. Blair Witch gave him the weeping confessional and the night descent. Ju-on supplied contagion in scattered vignettes, where proximity to a cursed place is enough to doom a bystander. Noroi is the closest craft debt: a faux-documentary stitched together by a filmmaker-editor whose own motives are the real mystery. And Lake Mungo gave him the register the whole con needs, testimonial sincerity grounded in a mother's grief, home footage re-examined until the dread seeps up through it.

What it left behind is narrower than its notoriety and more interesting. Incantation made the delivery mechanism part of the apparatus. Its address assumes one viewer on one personal screen, probably alone, which is exactly what the Netflix rollout supplied. Cursed-media horror had been promising this could happen to you for decades while keeping the promise safely on screen. Ko built the machinery to actually attempt it, and proved a Taiwanese genre film could reach the world on a formal hook rather than a festival prize.

Masterstroke or cheat was the argument in 2022, and the argument is the evidence. Gimmicks don't leave people feeling implicated a week later. Notice what the film is actually about: not a deity but shared belief, a curse that works only because enough people join in. That's how a religion works. It's also how a video spreads. Watch it again and watch the asks, and watch the thirty seconds of footage before each one. She's most persuasive right after you've been handed a reason to trust her.