Detention

Detention (返校, 2019) is a Taiwanese horror film you can watch online on iFILM. Director John Hsu adapts the hit psychological video game by Red Candle Games, dropping the story into the White Terror of the early 1960s — a stretch of martial law when owning the wrong book could get you shot.

A schoolgirl named Fang Ray-shin wakes inside her own high school. The halls are flooded, faceless figures shuffle through the dark, and there is no way out. With a younger student, Wei, she pieces together what became of a secret reading group that passed banned books between desks. Someone informed on them. The dead are not finished with the living.

The film scares on two tracks. One is folklore — hungry ghosts, ritual, guilt. The other is colder and political: surveillance, betrayal and a regime that taught children to fear each other. It swept Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards and outdrew most local releases of its year. Stream Detention (2019) online on iFILM.