The Place You Must Not Enter, The Blessing-Curse of Parenthood, and My Personal Beef with Incantation (2022)

This post contains oh, so many spoilers.

Reader, I want to get one thing straight. Is this a safe space? Ok, listen. Here’s the thing: I’m gullible as hell. My willingness to buy into a story defies human logic – I’ve been on the receiving end of quite a few disbelieving stares from my hyperbole-loving colleagues. Fine, sure, for half a second I truly believed you had to tie someone to the roof of your car. Once my brain caught up I understood what you meant, but in the meantime wasn’t it fun to witness a grown adult completely abandon common sense in the pursuit of a Normal Human Conversational Rhythm?

I can joke about it now, but sometimes it can be really triggering to realize in that split second of shame that I missed a tinge of sarcasm or an unspoken context clue. It used to get me into some unsavory situations with classmates as a kid. I was gregarious enough to think I could outsmart bullies and too goodhearted to assume they’d tell a bold-faced lie. Once I got bold enough to test out a “your momma” joke on a kid who’d been eating away at my nerves. Solemn-faced, he replied, “my mom died last night.” All right then! Lesson learned! We can’t tell jokes, because people’s moms can literally just die, and it doesn’t even matter whether it’s true or not, the result is still a puddle of liquefied shame where there used to be a third grader.

For the past few days I’ve been sitting down to write about one of the movies I’ve watched recently, spitting out some half-fledged ideas, realizing I didn’t care enough, and inevitably rage quitting. I had some really good thoughts in defense of the ill-received sequels to Hell House, LLC. I had some timely reflections on the recent “I Saw the TV Glow” trend on TikTok. Nothing’s really been getting me fired up, though, so I decided to dig back through my past year of watching and ask myself: “What movie can I just not shut up about?”

That movie, dear reader, is the 2022 found footage nightmare Incantation, directed by Kevin Ko.

This film is one of those ones that pops up in conversation around horror fans these days. One of the predictors of a successful contemporary horror film seems to be an Unspeakable Twist, a spoiler so sacred that everyone commits to keeping it under wraps. This would be a good time to remind you that yes, spoiler talk is coming. Yes, there is still time to back out.

Incantation starts with a young mother, Li Ronan, asking us to recite a blessing with her. Her family has been suffering a curse because of a religious taboo she broke while pregnant. She entered a forbidden tunnel – a Place You Must Not Enter. Her daughter is very sick, but if we share in this blessing we may be able to increase its power to save her. Two very important things happen as Li Ronan employs our help: First, she breaks the fourth wall from the very first moment of the film. We open with a direct address to the viewer. We know from the moment she starts speaking that we are not taking a passive role in this story. Second, in the process of recruiting us, Li Ronan demonstrates how we can make real, observable changes in the world using just our thoughts. Using a series of video optical illusions, she makes sure we understand the power of words spoken silently in one’s head. These are the two most important rules in Incantation: You are complicit in this woman’s actions, and you have agency in your participation.

The story of Li Ronan is a tragedy told in non-chronological snippets. Her daughter Dodo is coming home for the first time after six years in foster care, and Ronan is making a “New Life Video Diary” of their first few months together. We see the blessings of parenthood through little moments: playtime, bedtime, special birthday outings. Ronan teaches Dodo to write her full name, Chen Le-tung, and it feels like the two are really becoming family. Their relationship is not without its difficult moments, however. Either Dodo is experiencing nightmarish hallucinations of a ceiling-dwelling “Baddie,” or the child has been taken by her mother’s curse. Ronan is not without her struggles too: the fear of something we thought she’s overcome continues to follow her. Is this new little family haunted, possessed, or… something else?

The intro sets the stage for the driving thesis of the film: Blessings and curses are two sides of the same coin, so painfully illustrated through the dynamic blessing-curse of parenthood. The film so accurately plays on the anxieties of building a relationship with a young child you don’t know – especially a child experiencing trauma. Factor in that Ronan herself is recovering from the loss of her boyfriend, a creative partner, and her parents, and you can’t help but empathize with her fears. Is she doing the right thing? Could her best, most compassionate effort only cause harm?

On the surface it seems like Ronan is “coping too close to the sun” and refusing to see something that she knows deep down is real. We often see Ronan practice a mindfulness exercise in response to her fear. She prompts herself, “Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think,” and seemingly clears her mind completely for a moment. She teaches her daughter to do the same with anchors to her favorite foods and animals. Is that to keep Dodo safe, or does she have some other purpose? By now she knows the reality of this curse. It’s taken family members, friends, and strangers right in front of her. A curse follows her literally everywhere – she must believe in it. Even people she casually comes into contact with, like social workers and police officers, meet some tragic end seemingly unrelated to Ronan herself. Has her treatment after her breakdown really helped her to pathologize away the horrors that follow her?

This all raises the culminating question: Why is Li Ronan bringing her daughter into her life in the first place? In a rooftop mislead that had me screaming at my TV, we realize just how dangerous Dodo’s new life actually is. By the time Ronan finds her daughter on this unattended adventure with the Baddie, Dodo is chanting the titular incantation and seems to be struck with a mysterious illness. Things go from bad to worse to alarming enough to have Ronan reported to the Social Inadequacy Bureau.

Now, this is where I must admit that for all the compassion and empathy in the world, I don’t trust Li Ronan as far as I can throw her. Remember: I’m a self-accepting Gullible(TM)!! Mind games are my trigger!! And no one does mind games quite like Li Ronan. Our girl is a Content-mother-fucking-Creator. She knows how to tell a story, and this story is reaching us on her terms.

For you to understand my mistrust, unfortunately, I must spoil this movie’s sacred twist. Do you remember the two dominating rules of this universe? After the spiral of worsening events draws us in, we are invested in finding out more about the curse following Ronan. Dodo’s life depends on getting to the bottom of the mystery that has fallen into our laps. Don’t forget the power of words spoken silently in your head. With ten minutes left and the movie nearly finished, Li Ronan has set us up to be her little prayer warriors, sharing in and strengthening the so-called blessing that can save Dodo. She displays the now-familiar sigil that has followed us throughout the movie along with the entirety of the incantation’s text. Words flash by as the the guttural chant, “hou-ho-xiu-yi, si-sei-wu-ma,” drones on and on. It draws our focus in, cycling through words so quickly that we must read with intent to keep up. Before we realize what we’re doing, the screen is repeating, “OFFER YOUR NAME SILENTLY,” and we probably have to do quite a bit of our own mindfulness practice to avoid doing so. If you’re anything like my husband, you see this coming a mile away and stop reading, um, IMMEDIATELY. If you’re anything like me, this is about the point the sneaking suspicion starts. The true gut-punch of dread is when the screen goes white and that sigil is still burned into your vision, following you wherever you look, even when you close your eyes. Mind racing, full panic, googling-what-tariffs-are-the-day-after-the-election kind of shit.

Obviously there’s no blessing! Obviously I’m the perfect mark for Content-fucking-Creator Li Ronan, and obviously I have been horrendously cursed. What Li Ronan knows, what she’s known this whole time, is that we’re chanting, “I accept this curse and I offer up my name.” This is a curse of sharing: the more people it is spread to, the less powerful it becomes. Spread to enough people, it might stop killing everyone Ronan knows – or, perhaps, we’re yet another offering she’s burning through to save her own ass. We realize far too late that Ronan has known about the curse since before Dodo was even born. With this one revelation, all of Ronan’s motives suddenly come into question. A tender moment, like teaching Dodo to write her name, becomes a stinging betrayal. Why have we been calling her Dodo all this time in the first place? She’d gone six years without knowing her real name, and the second it’s brought into play, the hauntings begin in earnest and she has been pulled into her mother’s nightmare. That would have seemed like pure coincidence before, but now we realize that the final piece of the puzzle is a mother so desperate for salvation that she would offer up her own daughter. It brings into question whether Ronan has any intention of nurturing her relationship with Dodo, or if literally everyone Ronan comes into contact with is subject to her need to distribute her curse. Once Dodo becomes ill, is Ronan keeping her alive because she’s fallen in love in spite of her plan? Or is she relying that strongly on Dodo receiving her share?

If this all seems very cynical, please understand that I don’t think any of Ronan’s actions are done in malice. I think this is a traumatized woman trying to self-preserve. She has an innovative plan to super-spread her plight, but let’s be real: her YouTube channel is going to have to pull some real numbers for any of this to bear fruit. Instead she is left with a dying daughter for whom she’s lost custody atop an ever-growing list of casualties. Dodo in the first act, with her charm, with her optimism, makes it very clear what the blessing of parenthood is. Ronan thought that she could sacrifice her but ended up loving her instead. Dodo in the final act shows that the real curse of parenthood is the fear – and realization – that it could suddenly end. Our choices have very real consequences, and sometimes the ones who bear those consequences are the innocents we leave in our wake.

The more you think about the curse, the more you know about it, the more it affects you. That is why we see Ronan clear her mind so frequently. The symbolism of “The Place You Must Not Enter” is such a solid representation of the tender and messy period of healing where you’re starting to feel okay, but only because you’re using the healthy coping skills to escape reality in the time between doing the work. As long as I keep not thinking about it, I’ll be fine. Mindfulness is a healthy coping skill! Not thinking about it is fine! Not thinking about it is… ultimately not sustainable. We have to go back to the dark places we avoid in order to confront and hopefully heal them.

This movie left me feeling violated and utterly manipulated. In doing so it pulled me away into the reality of its universe. Incantation let me make myself part of a beautiful story about grief and the outward ripples of trauma that eat away at those we love. I haven’t come across another film that has drawn such a visceral reaction from me, and that’s why I’ve chosen to spoil it for you today. As Ronan suggests, if it bothers you, just try not thinking about it. Remember your favorite things. Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think. The betrayal, the chant, the sigil, and your willingness to share in it will probably stop haunting you. Eventually.

I’d love to know what you thought about Incantation! And while you’re at it, what optical illusions mess with your head?

Until next time, dear reader, the horrors may persist, but “When you open your eyes every day, be as happy as you can.”

Find where you can watch Incantation here!

Trigger warnings: trypophobia, unreliable narrator, foster homes, child surrender, child illness, starvation, vomiting, self-injury, suicide, face distortion jump scares, shaky cam, religion, body mutilation, insects