John Hsu’s Detention is an adaptation of a Taiwanese video game. As I write this, there’s a part of me that feels happy knowing that this exists. A historical hybrid film like this was a box office and a film festival success. It’s also visually wild, as it goes from the grayish metallic tints of the contemporaneous scenes to flashbacks that are both in black and white and in colour. When I say contemporanous, I mean the Taiwanese White Terror, four decades when the Kuomintang tortured and killed suspected communists. One of those suspected communists is a student, Wei Chong Ting (Jing-Hua Tseng), who blacks out after hours of torture and wakes up to see an abandoned version of his school.

The only other person in the school is a girl, Feng Rey Shin (Gingle Wang), who is tangentially part of his book club that reads forbidden Russian literature. Even if we start with Wei, most of the film is about Feng. The flashbacks reveal that Feng has a relationship with one of the teachers, Chang Ming-Hui (Fu Mengbo). Detention shows that they both have feelings for each other. They meet through open door office hours and they never consummate their relationship, thank God. And yes, I’m an Asian and a Millennial so I should be used to these kind of plots, but the air of discomfort watching them together is still there.

Feng’s parents (Hsia Ching-ting and Pen-yu Chang) neglect her, so Chang is the only person who can comfort her. But Chang’s colleague and co-‘conspirator’, Miss Yin (Cecilia Choi) warns him about the relationship. Heeding this warning, he tries to end his meetings with Feng, who does something that inadvertently puts Wei in that torture chamber. The movie, then, occassionally leaves this inappropriately sweet romance. It returns to being a horror film set in a school where chararcters pop up to tell Feng that she’s apparently a bad person even if, in another perspective, she’s actually a victim.

Detention piles on Feng without addressing the thing that Gen-Z moralists may hate about it. Again, it tells its story with erratic visuals, but that’s not without its rewards. Once or twice a year for the past few years we get a horror film that’s green. And I’m happy that this movie follos that trend. But I’ve written before and will write it now. Visuals can only do so much if it can’t flesh out its characters and plot. I’m a terrible person who’s done more but smaller bad things than Feng and thus have received lesser consequences.

Feng, theoretically, feels like she represents me. However, the movie’s build up isn’t good enough to paint her as an anti-hero. It’s supposedly ok to decide to build this movie to paint her as an inadvertent antagonist, or to manifest her guilt. But what it does with that foundation isn’t satisfactory. In acquiring streaming rights to this movie, OVID’s dipping into horror. This is a misstep although I have a feeling that there may be better horror films coming to the platform.

Watch Detention on OVID.