Nightstream 2020: ‘Detention’ pulses with tremendous, gutting heart

Taiwan underwent an excruciating 38-year and 57-day period of martial law called White Terror (from roughly 1949 to 1987). Tens of thousands of citizens were massacred for either real or imagined insurgence against the Chinese Nationalist Party and hundreds of thousands more were imprisoned in derelict conditions, tortured, and mutilated . “The scene could take place anywhere at any hour, day or night: family or friends would watch their loved ones being dragged off by armed men, or passers-by would witness a person being seized by armed men off the street, tied up, blindfolded, bundled into a car and driven to police headquarters,” journalist Huang Tai-lin observed about a then-new historical exhibit for Taipei Times in 2005.

Such gnawing, bone-chilling fear takes gnarly root in Detention, a Taiwanese film directed by John Hsu, who co-wrote the script with Fu Kai-ling and Chien Shi-keng. Based on a video game of the same name, distributed by Red Candle Games, spooky, reality-distorting imagery abounds, and it’s always to accentuate the real life horrors drowning the characters as they attempt to survive such an oppressive regime.

One of even temperament and swelling compassion, Wei Chung-ting (Tseng Ching-hua) always does what is right and true, set-up right from the start when he descalates a confrontation between a classmate and the stern, unrelenting commanding inspector Bai (Chu Hung-chang), an alarming, formidable presence. He casts a very long, unsettling shadow, and his stranglehold over the school manifests in far more than banned books on left-wing idealogy. Something has been slumbering far underground, and when Wei and his love interest Fang Ray-Shin (Gingle Wang), whose oggling of counselor Mr. Zhang (Fu Meng-Po) further tangles the deceptive web, get caught in some warped upside down, they must combat the powers that be, once and for all.

You see, Mr. Zhang and his colleague Miss Yin Tsui-han (Cecilia Choi) have been meeting in secret to teach a small group of students about certain banned books. Thirst for knowledge and truth has been going unsatisfied for far too long, and as dangerous as such defiance is, they are willing to bet their lives on it. The tension runs high, and they’re always on the precipice of being discovered. When someone does rat them out, it is surely the beginning of the end.

Detention largely operates such brutal realities like cogs in a machine, each gear jagged and toothy and barely propelling the apparatus forward, lurching between time periods and points of view. It’s frantic and frankly quite confusing as the narrative spirals out in the second act, but Hsu’s vision is meant to be consumed as such; imagery is unsettling and always serves a purpose. It’s as one might expect from video game adaptations, but rarely does it leave you gasping with guttural emotion quite like this. In peeling back particularly dark and harbored secrets, those provoked from reckless teenage abandon and disregard for any consequence, Hsu drags you kicking, screaming, and flailing into deep dungeons of tragedy.

The monsters Fang and Wei encounter are grotesque shadow men that directly mirror the real life armed militia. You’re never supposed to know whether these goblins are a direct threat or simply fantastical manifestations of trauma. Either way, the terror hangs thick on the camera lens and pulls the story’s walls closer around our protagonists, so much so it gets downright claustrophobic and grim.

Detention runs the risk of being a bit clunky, but the pay-off comes with its tremendous heart throbbing at its core. In the final scenes, a time jump decades into the future, John Hsu course corrects and absolutely hits the nail on the head, coming full circle with the awful truth about White Terror, a period most have been willing to forget.

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