Taixian
台仙魔咒
China, 2018, colour, 2.35:1, 78 mins.
Director: Song Rui 宋睿.
Rating: 4/10.
Modest, initially simple seance horror develops some depth as it progresses.
STORY
Northern China, the present day. A group of six young high-school friends travelling in the countryside are stranded when one of their two cars has a puncture. With no phone signal available they set out to find help and come across a house which seems to be empty, though candles are burning in the rooms. Upstairs Kong Jia (Ye Changqing) and his girlfriend An Yao (Zeng Yilian) find a traditional Chinese table and four chairs. They suggest they play the “table spirit” 台仙 game, a kind of group seance in which a ghost is summoned to answer questions. Kong Jia and the three girls – An Yao, Jiang Qian (Yan Renxiang) and Mo Di (Liu Jing) – take part but when no spirit appears they abandon the game. Left alone upstairs, Jiang Qian is found unconscious and unable to speak. (She had been annoyed at another girl, Ning Xin [Liu Shuhan], for beating her in a high-school contest.) All Jiang Qian can manage to do is write the words “table spirit” on a notepad. Next to suffer is Mo Di, who’s found unconscious on the stairs, her arm injured. (She had felt betrayed when Ning Xin, who’d befriended her after she was bullied by other girls, went out with Kong Jia, whom Mo Di fancied.) The group suspects the problem is that they summoned the “table spirit” but did not wait to ask it any questions. Next, the candles are all blown out and An Yao is later found unconscious. (She had been jealous of Ning Xin for supposedly stealing her boyfriend Kong Jia. She’d then helped to spread a false rumour at school that Ning Xin had been raped in the street one night, a rumour which eventually led to Ning Xin committing suicide.) So, is the “table spirit” the vengeful ghost of Ning Xin?
REVIEW
One-man quickie-horror industry, Shandong-born Wang Liang 王良, 27, continues to plough the same furrow with Taixian 台仙魔咒, an economically plotted “ghost” story in which six high-school students appear to fall foul of a vengeful spirit they’ve summoned during a seance in a deserted house. This time, Wang takes just presenting and scriptwriting credits, rather than directing and (thankfully) acting as well, passing the official directing reins to one of his regular actresses, Jilin-born Song Rui 宋睿, making her debut behind the camera. Regular Wang collaborators – especially d.p. Liu Qingqing 刘情情 and editor Li Jian 李健 – ensure a smooth production on an obviously modest budget. If quickie horrors have become a major route for entry and experimentation in the Mainland industry, then Taixian is above average of its type, fanning out a simple seance-gone-wrong story into one of background high-school jealousies, as well as dispensing with the usual final explanatory scene by a psychologist.
Taixian is the better of two horrors that Wang made in 2017 with the same production companies and similar crews, the other being the lame Linglong Wells 玲珑井 (2018, see poster, left), directed by himself and starring him, Song and Taixian’s top-billed Luo Xiang 罗翔. In its initial stages, the script – credited solely to Wang, though earlier sources also include Gao Guobin 高国斌 (Linglong Wells, plus Wang’s Taboo Terror of Going Back 午夜惊魂路, 2017) – seems to have been written during a lunch break, with no backgrounding, a simple set-up and even the generic line “What kind of weird place is this? There’s not even a phone signal!” Flashbacks to the group’s high-school life are initially introduced without warning but gradually build the main story, and even the fact that the characters’ names are only drip-fed to the viewer turns out to be part of the central deception. As the background is layered in – including a soupçon of sapphic tease – the final section actually turns out to be the richest in the film.
Performances are standard, with looker Liu Shuhan 刘书含 marginally standing out as the girl who’s central to the plot and Zeng Yilian 曾漪莲 (Wang’s Spirit Touch Seventh Sense 七月半3 灵触第七感, 2017) as a jealous girlfriend. D.p. Liu’s constantly roving camera again adds a touch of style and the uncredited music (piano, strings, wordless vocal) is simple but effective. The Chinese title means “Evil Curse of the Table Spirit”. Box office was a mere RMB1 million, half that of Linglong Wells.
CREDITS
Presented by Andy Film & TV Making (Laiwu) (CN), Zhongyi Yingna Pictures (Beijing) (CN).
Script: Wang Liang. Photography: Liu Qingqing. Editing: Li Jian. Music: uncredited. Art direction: Zhang Li. Styling: Wang Hai. Sound: Yan Shimin, Xu Hongfei. Executive direction: Su Guangqi.
Cast: Luo Xiang (Zhu Fan), Liu Shuhan (Ning Xin), Ye Changqing (Kong Jia), Zeng Yilian (An Yao), Zhang Jiahao (Ning Ke), Liu Jing (Mo Di), Yan Renxiang (Jiang Qian).
Release: China, 2 Nov 2018.