John Hsu’s Detention gives a horror movie makeover to Taiwan’s darkest moment in history. Taking place during the country’s period known as the “White Terror”, a 38-year period of martial law where 140,000 alleged “political dissidents” were jailed and countless others executed by the state, Detention attempts to mix dark fantastical elements in with real-world political histories much like Guillermo del Toro did with the Spanish Civil War in Pan’s Labyrinth. The end result here is much, much less effective.

Adapted from the Red Candle Games’ horror video game of the same name, the Mandarin-language Detention largely fails to breathe life into its characters and landscape. With a plot that jumps around different time periods as well as through character’s actual lives and their subconscious, Detention is often an unintentionally confusing mess where it’s difficult to track who is who and where and when they are.

The story revolves mostly around two characters; Fang Ray-shin (Gingle Wang), an outcast middle school student who harbors an unhealthy love for her politically active teacher Mr. Chang (Fu Meng-po); and Wei (Tseng Ching-hua), the last known survivor of an illegal book club organized by Mr. Chang. The two students meet accidentally in their old middle school and go about searching for the lost Mr. Chang but it’s clear from the get-go that they’re operating in some kind of nightmare subconscious realm and things go downhill from here quickly.

Hsu fails more often than not to make the time jumps and transitions from real to surreal legible. I found myself too frequently trying to piece together wherein the story we were and why it mattered to the larger scheme of things. The story shortcoming isn’t helped by the rather poor CGI, which looks not unlike early-gen video game graphics. By the last scenes, Detention does manage to make a bit of impact but that can’t erase its earlier flailing and lack of singular focus.

Between substandard effects, a general lack of scares, and the overall sloppiness of the narrative, Detention just can’t deliver the goods at the level it wants to. I found myself in a state of crushing indifference when all was said and done, which is a shame because there is a potential here, unrealized though it may be. That the highlight of the film is in the quiet day-lit moments where brave-hearted students copy banned books in a storage closet speaks to its how truly out of tune the horror notes here are.