Incantation

• Director Kevin Ko built the story on a real 2005 Kaohsiung case in which the Wu family, convinced they were possessed by a string of Taoist and Buddhist deities, subjected themselves to starvation and self-harm; the eldest daughter died of multiple organ failure and malnutrition during the ordeal, and the surviving five members were later ruled to have suffered mass hysteria. Ko fictionalized the deity and ritual rather than dramatize the case directly.
• The Mother-Buddha (Dahei Fomu) cult, the cursed symbol, and the chant 'Hou-ho-xiu-yi, si-sei-wu-ma' were entirely invented for the film. Ko and the cast publicly confirmed every element of the religion was fabricated after viewers reported real-world bad luck and superstitious panic from reciting the chant.
• The film weaponizes its found-footage frame: Ronan breaks the fourth wall to recruit the viewer into 'blessing' her daughter, and the third-act reveal is that the chant and symbol you've been memorizing exist to dilute the curse by spreading it to you. The audience is the mark.
• Released in Taiwan on March 18, 2022, it grossed roughly NT$170 million (about US$5.7 million) at home, making it both the highest-grossing film of any kind at Taiwan's 2022 box office and the top-earning original Taiwanese horror film of all time.
• Netflix picked it up for a global release on July 8, 2022, where it logged about 10.85 million hours viewed in the week of July 11-17 to land at number three on the platform's weekly non-English film chart and stayed in the global Top 10 for five straight weeks, the most-watched Taiwanese film on Netflix.
• It scored 13 nominations at the 59th Golden Horse Awards in 2022, including Best Narrative Feature and Best Director, and won two, for Best Film Editing and Best Sound Effects.

The whole movie is Ronan's confession-as-trap. Her warm, pleading direct address to the camera reads as a mother begging for help, but the structure mirrors how the curse propagates in the story: belief plus repetition equals transmission. Read that way, the film isn't documenting an attempt to save Dodo, it's executing the ritual on the audience, and Ronan's apparent love is the bait that makes you participate willingly.

The non-linear editing isn't just style, it's the curse's logic made literal. Ronan withholds the cave footage and the meaning of the symbol until the end specifically so you commit the chant to memory before you know what it does. The fractured timeline is the deity's mechanism: understanding always arrives one beat too late, after consent has already been given.

Mother-Buddha functions as a parasite of faith rather than a traditional vengeful ghost. The curse doesn't punish a single transgression; it feeds on the act of believing and is weakened only when shared, which inverts the usual horror moral that knowledge protects you. Here, the more people who 'know' the blessing, the safer the original victim becomes, making devotion itself the contagion.

Six years after a doomed visit to her family's mountain home destroyed her sanity, Li Ronan reclaims her daughter from foster care and starts filming everything to protect her. The camera knows better. What broke Ronan was a forbidden tunnel, a deity called Mother-Buddha, and a vow she desecrated. Now the rot is coming for her child. Ronan turns to the only ritual she has left: dragging the person on the other side of the lens into the curse with her. By the time you understand the chant, you've already said it.