‘Ritual’ or Routine?
It’s more Taiwanese urban legends in the pre-sequel to ‘The Bridge Curse’ no one asked for.
THE Bridge Curse 2: Ritual
Director: Lester Hsi • Writers: Chang Keng-ming, Hao Po-hsiang, Lu Shih-yuan
Starring: Wang Yu-xuan, JC Lin, Patrick Shih, Shawn Hu, Chan Tzu-hsuan, Riko Xi, Boris Wang
Taiwan • 1hr 41mins
Opens Hong Kong November 30 • IIB
Grade: C
When we left the intrepid reporter and her ghostly camera operator in the editing room (?) at the end of 2020’s The Bridge Curse, she’d just uncovered the secret of the actual ghosts haunting Taiwan’s Donghu University, standing in for the actual, allegedly haunted Tunghai University. The film was loosely based on the legend of midnight disappearances on a bridge on the school grounds and the 2018 documentation of the ghost (a spurned girlfriend and/or rape victim of course) by a group of students. I think. I can barely remember because though it took its sweet time picking up steam, Lester Hsi Yu-long’s part mockumentary, part found footage horror time-waster was good enough to pass 90 minutes but not much more. Unoriginal, yes – the ghost has scraggly black hair, sunken eyes and a white dress, and enough of this – but diverting. It left space for a sequel so of course there’s a sequel.
For The Bridge Curse 2: Ritual | 女鬼橋2：怨鬼樓, Hsi and writers Chang Keng-ming, Hao Po-hsiang and Lu Shih-yuan swap out the annoying mobile phone moments for slightly less annoying video game moments, because this time around, a fresh group of pesky kids students at Yangminshan’s Chinese Culture University – Taiwan is evidently maggoty with haunted institutions of higher learning – are creating an AR video game based on the school’s spooky past. Ritual is a marginal improvement on the first film; it’s slightly more creative, but its extra 15 minutes make it bloated and repetitive. It wears out its welcome.
Our final girl
Legend states that a bitter architect (an architect’s default state) messed with the harmonious bagua design for the university during construction and turned the whole building into a magnet for malicious spirits. This spectral hotspot is where Ting (Wang Yu-xuan, Goddamned Asura) is helping with the final beta test of a new ghost-hunting game created by her comatose brother (Patrick Shih Bo-yu). He fell into this coma years before while researching urban legends for the game and getting into a mysterious elevator mishap. Ting has all manner of spooky encounters of her own during the test phase, and the only one who believes her is the school’s paranoid security guard, De (JC Lin Cheng-hsi, The Scoundrels), who connects the two stories. Why is he so quick to trust her? Why doesn’t he ever leave the building? Why is Ting so devoted to her brother? Will she pull him out of the purgatory of his coma? Is the game ready for release? Does this university have a bridge somewhere? And where’s the damn ritual?
Like so many better (and crappier) films that came before it, Ritual has a case of sequelitis. There’s more CGI and more confounding backstory, neither of which does much to keep the story lean enough to follow effortlessly. The effort detracts from the spooky parts, which are in short supply, the same problem in the first film. But where that one was at least atmospheric, the VFX here simply underscore how unscary the film truly is. It’s most effective moments are the ones that rely on light, shadow, and good ol’ fashioned moving shit around between edits. Ting’s lo-fi ballet mannequin encounter is a highlight; the data rich showdown with the angry architect not so much. The bond between Ting and her brother and their traumatic childhood suggests Ritual has a little more on its mind, but the subplot never really takes root beyond pitting the painfully bland Ting against some malevolent spirits. It doesn’t help that the urban legend angle makes both films recall The Tag-Along. Watch that instead. — DEK