Lost in the Woods
You know what? Maybe just avoid Taiwan?
haunted Mountains: The yellow Taboo
Director: Tsai Chia-ying • Writer: Zou Wan-zhen
Starring: Japser Liu, Angela Yuen, Tsao Yu-ning, Spark Chen
Taiwan • 1hr 29mins
Opens Hong Kong August 21 • IIB
Grade: B-
Okay this is getting to be a thing. China has its over-explanatory backtracking SEA hellhole thrillers (No More Bets, Lost in the Stars, etc, etc) and it would seem Taiwan has a horror movie cottage industry rooted in its myriad urban legends. One is a clever novelty, two is a trend. Any more is an Industrial Complex. In the shadow of The Tag-Along, The Tag-Along 2, The Tag-Along: The Devil Fish, The Bridge Curse and Ritual and Them, Behind the Door as start comes Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo | 山忌 黃衣小飛俠, a chiller by way of Groundhog Day loosely based on the legend of the yushan xiaofeixia, friendly yellow raincoated ghosts that guide hikers through the misty mountains.
Some of these stories are truly creepy, and some of the filmmakers are obviously having a good time with material. But for every The Tag-Along there’s a Them, in which the writers and directors get bogged down by the minutiae of the lore and lose focus before veering off into unintentional hilarity. First-time feature director Tsai Chia-ying lands somewhere in the middle, blessed with a cool time loop premise but addled by overly-complex mythology.
Yet we still hike in Taiwan
In a cold open we see a young hiker getting lost on Taiwan’s Jia Yu Mountain, stumbling to a hut in the forest and promptly getting levitated by some kind of force. It’s the last we see of him for some time. Some time later, Chen Jia-ming (Jasper Liu Yi-hao, A Gilded Game) and his would-be fiancée Song Yu-xin (Angela Yuen Lai-lam) wake up in their camping rental thingy before hiking the same route. Maybe. They’re a couple in distress, he’s unsure of her feelings for him, she’s frustrated by his inability to just sit and tell her what he’s thinking and feeling. They’re also up on the mountain on the fifth anniversary of his bestie and her ex Zhang An-wei’s (Tsao Yu-ning) disappearance during the trio’s last hike. Awkward. They’re having a middling time when they stumble upon an accident scene involving a fallen hiker, and things take a turn back at the hotel, where Yu-xin has an accident herself and dies. The next morning Jia-ming wakes up back at the camping rental and the day repeats. And then again the next day, and so on.
Needless to say, all this points to several personal mysteries, one involving an older couple (Spark Chen Ru-shan and Chen Hsiao-hsuan) still hoping to rest their missing son in peace even, though they still need to find the body. They tried, but the folk ritual the local shaman (Wu Kun-da) set up for them was interrupted, and fucked up the whole thing.
Tsai and writer Zou Wan-zhen do a decent job of weaving together the film’s various threads, some of which are clever semi-twists that juice the otherwise conventional story just enough to keep your attention. The Groundhog Day angle is also an early surprise, one that’s quite welcome, but it loses its punch when Tsai and Zou head off the main path and try to puff up the backstory. The undercurrents of romantic uncertainty, fate, choice and jealousy lend Haunted Mountains a soapy, melodramatic element the film doesn’t need – either that or an element it needs to lean into much harder.
It’s up to Liu to make all this work, and he’s mostly up to the task, telegraphing, first, increasing franticism as he tries to stop Yu-xin’s death again and again, then slowly coming to grips with the sins of his past and letting go (that’s made literal at one point) of his guilt and uncertainty. Yuen is little more than window dressing. By the standards expected from the Taiwanese Urban Legend Horror Industrial Complex, Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo isn’t a disaster, and DOP Chang Chun-lin, not in his first urban legend rodeo (he shot The Bridge Curse: Ritual) makes the most of the fog and forest to create an oppressive vibe that could easily make you feel you were trapped in a gloomy cycle of your own making.