[Fantasia 2020 Review] Detention is a Fantastic Video Game Adaption Hampered by its Roots

Detention is probably the best video game adaptation I’ve seen. I realize, in saying this, that that doesn’t necessarily mean much. Cinema has been littered with so many failed adaptations that we look to films like Resident Evil or the slightly verbose and bloated Silent Hill as some of the more shining examples. In Detention’s case, I do mean this as both a positive and a negative because while it tackles the story of the video game with pathos and resonate thematic ties to Taiwan’s White Terror period, it’s actually the video game aspects that hold it back from being a masterpiece. 

In a opening that juxtaposes its romantically shot cinematography with a school under the harsh thumb of martial law, we’re introduced to Wei (Jing-Hua Tseng) and his nervous friend Sheng (Chin-Yu Pan) as they march into Greenwood High’s schoolyard. Standing between the two lines of gender-specific marching students is Inspector Bai (Hung Chang Chu), who pulls Sheng to the side and demands to see what’s in his bag. The quick-thinking Wei runs to Sheng’s side and pulls out a puppet from his bag so Bai doesn’t dig deeper to find a contraband book of poetry. 

You see, we’re told through text on the screen that any books containing communist or left-wing thoughts were illegal. A book of poetry could be a punishable offense, even up to the death penalty. In an accompanying voice over, Wei tells us that they lived in an era where “talking about freedom was a crime and reading banned books would cost us our lives.” But read them they did. Wei and Sheng are part of an illicit book club, organized by teachers Miss Yin (Cecilia Choi) and Mr. Zhang (Meng-Po Fu). The group of students meet in a storeroom and after teachers started falling under the attention of the military police, the students started smuggling the books in themselves. 

This beautifully and romantically shot opening brings to mind the way Guillermo del Toro mixed the warmth of Pan’s Labyrinth with the underlying fascist coldness. And like his masterpiece, we’re not given much time to linger in this romanticized past of laughing kids reading poetry by Rabindranath Tagore as it cuts to Wei, hanging upside down and being dunked repeatedly in a water tank while military police demand where the book came from. From this scene of real life brutality we’re transported back to the school as Fang Ray-Shin (Gingle Wang) wakes up in a classroom. It’s night and the school is deserted. She anxiously searches the school and sees Mr. Zhang walking ahead of her. Shes chases after him but ends up running into Wei, who is equally confused about what’s going on at Greenwood High School. 

The two explore the school for Mr. Zhang and to understand the nightmarish situation they find themselves in, and find themselves chased by monsters, both literal and figurative. And as we learn about the connection between Fang and Wei, as well as her forbidden romance with Mr. Zhang, we also learn about the events that lead to their waking nightmare. 

The way Detention is structured really helps with the pacing as it combines a very solitary exploration of the campus with the real world events that led to it. Additionally, the narrative fractures and tells us both Wei’s story and Fang’s story to see how they crisscrossed and to fill in missing bits of the story. Detention wears its inspirations on its sleeve as it borrows liberally from games and movies like Silent Hill. 

Like the town of Silent Hill, Greenwood High School becomes a purgatorial nightmare where the events in the real world affect the nightmare world in thematic ways. Detention, after all, is a purgatory of sorts, so it only makes sense that the film would lean hard on that title, particularly at a time when being “detained” is a question of life or death. Continuing with the Silent Hill influences, the monster that chases the kids feels like a perfect homage to Pyramid Head’s legacy and the horrors it represents. A tall, gangly creature with a Kuomintang (KMT) police cap and a baton, the monster parrots back its nationalistic creed with a dying bullhorn loudness.  

It’s just that these video game homages and plot structure of the nightmare world really hurts the pacing and demeans the themes the film is willing to explore. The nightmare sequences follow a bread crumb story that has Wei and Fang dodging ghosts and monsters on their way to their next clue. Get a key to unlock X door to unlock a flashback to remind them of the bunker, so they have a new destination to run to for another story tease.

In this way, it mimics the video game (and video games in general), but it also serves as a reminder that, yes, this is a video game adaptation. What’s frustrating is that it doesn’t need those little flourishes as it actually has a good story that fits the structure of cinema. And by doing so, it kind of kills the pacing to the point I was more interested in the flashback sequences than I was the one note nightmare realm. 

That said, Detention does have some incredibly arresting visuals like an empty theatre suddenly filled with people with bloodied burlap sacks over their heads. In fact, the use of a theatrical play to represent what’s happening in the real world is inspired and creepy. Little staged flashes that inform both the past and the future are startling in their nonchalant violence. I feel, though, that if they had stripped the more gamey aspects of it and really honed further in on the relationships between the characters, it would have truly been something special. 

As it is, Detention is the best video game adaptation I’ve watched...I just wish it didn’t wear its inspirations so blatantly.