In short: The Rope Curse (2018)

Original title: Zong xie

Warning: vague spoilers ahead!

Apparently, at least if we can believe the movie at hand, it is custom in Taiwan and certain coastal areas of China to hinder the spirit of someone who has committed suicide by hanging from turning into something dangerous with the help of a ritual. In it the rope (and the spirit bound to it with it, I assume) is transported via a pretty elaborate looking procession towards the sea and burned.

Jiawei (Jason Tsou) and his best buddy (Chu Chung-Heng, I believe) have gotten permission from the buddy’s exorcist uncle (Chen Bor Jeng) to film such a procession for their streaming channel full of creepy stuff, the burning of a the rope a young bride killed herself with. Particularly Jiawei hopes to make it big with this and earn enough money as an internet sensation to not be penniless when he marries his fiancée Shuyi (Kimi Hsia). Why, the buddy has even acquired the, ahem, talents of what he calls a “big tit internet talent” to help in their goal.

Of course, things go very wrong indeed, the rope falling by the wayside unburnt, its curse continuing. And wouldn’t you know it, said “big tit internet talent” is its first new victim. What at first seems somewhat random will eventually turn out to be connected to the bullying-caused suicide of Shuyi’s best friend from high school.

While it isn’t exactly a masterful example of horror from Taiwan, Liao Shih-Han’s The Rope Curse is an often genuinely entertaining film that could have easily improved by not hitting the clichés it needs to work quite as hard as it does. Parts of the portrayal of Shuyi’s dead friend in the flashbacks are particularly problematic, going the old movie route of giving a very pretty girl a bad haircut, ridiculous glasses and a nasty looking rash to make her “ugly”, making it a bit difficult to take exactly those parts of the film completely seriously that should provide its emotional weight. The bullying is certainly nasty to watch (particularly when you have your own experiences with this sort of thing from childhood) but here, too, the film goes to movie-extreme, where showing a bit more restraint could have actually improved the audience’s emotional connection to what should be an actual tragedy instead of plot mechanics.

There’s a lot of this sort of thing in the film, really, characters that are broader than they should be, motivations that never quite come together, and so on. It’s a film that tries to be very emotionally involving but misses the mark because it is so obviously trying so very hard.

However, Liao is pretty good with most of the scenes of the haunting, hiding mediocre special effects below moody lighting and shadow, and often creating a surprisingly spooky mood. The film does make a lot out of its folk horror elements, having a much easier time portraying the logic of tradition than that of human emotions.