Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Louis Chan, Stone Chang
Starring: Yao Ai Ning, Wang Yu Ping, Chu Meng Syuan, Julia Huang, Rainie Dun, Helen Wang, Chun Hong
The long-haired female ghoul quickly became a staple of Japanese horror in the '90s but has since spread to the genre output of the entire Asian continent. Taiwan's Suffocation is the latest Asian horror movie to feature such an antagonist. These ghosts have long hair because that's how they appeared at the time of their death. If I was a woman living in Asia I would simply maintain a nice tight pixie cut to avoid succumbing to such a fate.
The lank-haired spirit emerges from Suffocation when a girl's body is found floating in a high school pool. Rather than shutting down the school, that evening's night class is allowed to go ahead. The students in the class aren't aware of the identity of the dead girl, but she appears to be well aware of them. Trapping them in the school via supernatural means, she takes possession of them one by one and forces them to take their own lives while under her control.
There is scant originality in Suffocation's plot. It's a rather generic J-horror knockoff with the usual setup of a group of youngsters falling prey to a curse inflicted by a wronged woman acting out from beyond the grave. The characters are similarly generic, but they don't even have any stereotypical traits to distinguish them from one another. Say what you will about the lazy character tropes of horror movies - the cheerleader, the geek, the jock, the shy one etc - but at least such clichés allow us to tell a group of poorly written characters apart. The girls here are practically clones of each other. None of them are clearly marked out as the "final girl," which on one hand means anyone can probably die at any time, but on the other hand there is no clear protagonist for us to invest in.
Where Suffocation sets itself apart is in its technical execution. Directors Louis Chan and Stone Chang have opted to present their film as a series of unbroken steadicam shots. It doesn't always pay off - some shots test our patience as we follow characters through dimly lit corridors for longer than is really necessary - but it occasionally produces impressive results. The students become trapped when their school morphs into a giant Escher painting/ Mobius strip, and there are some excellently rendered moments where characters dash up a flight of stairs only to run into the same people they left down below. Some of the shots will have you wondering how the FX team pulled them off.
But for all its technical audacity, Suffocation just isn't scary or suspenseful enough. As an experiment it will likely gain Chan and Chang some attention, but if the duo is to thrive in the horror field they'll need to add some storytelling and character depth to their bag of visual tricks.
