Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo Review
Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo (2025) Film Review from the 24th Annual Fantasia Film Festival, a movie directed by Chia-Ying Tsai, written by Wan-Zhen Zou, and starring Jasper Liu, Angela Yuen, Yu-Ning Tsao, and Spark Chen.
Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo is a debut feature from Taiwanese director Chia-Ying Tsai, and it arrives at Fantasia with the confidence of a filmmaker who understands how inseparable folklore is from everyday life. Co-written with Wan-Zhen Zou, the film blends romance, ghost story, and myth into a meditation on grief that is as atmospheric as it is unsettling.
The story follows Chia Ming (Jasper Liu) and Yu Hsin (Angela Yuen), a young couple hiking into Taiwan’s misty mountains. What begins as a simple trip with the promise of a marriage proposal soon collapses into horror when Yu Hsin dies unexpectedly. But her death is not the end. Time folds back, and Chia Ming finds himself reliving the same day, watching Yu Hsin die over and over again, powerless to change the outcome. The time-loop device is familiar in genre cinema, but here it becomes less about puzzle-solving and more about emotional repetition—the experience of grief replaying itself long after a loss.
Tsai grounds the supernatural elements in local tradition, particularly the figure of the Mountain Gremlin, a folkloric presence said to appear in a yellow raincoat and lure travelers to their doom. Rather than treating this as a simple monster, the film allows it to hang in the background like an extension of the landscape. The mountain itself becomes a character, holding both the living and the dead in its silence.
Visually, The Yellow Taboo is striking. The cinematography captures Taiwan’s forests in saturated greens and thick fog, creating an atmosphere that is less threatening than mournful. Spirits drift in and out of the frame without fanfare. The supernatural feels natural, an assumed part of life in the mountains rather than a shocking intrusion.
The film does move at a deliberate pace, and some viewers may find the repetition frustrating. Yet the structure reflects the experience of grief itself, with memory and regret returning in cycles that resist closure. In that sense, the lack of resolution is not a flaw but the point. The “taboo” of the title is less about superstition than about silence—the cultural tendency to leave certain wounds unspoken, even as they continue to shape the present.
Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo is not a conventional horror film, nor is it purely a romance. It is a work of atmosphere and suggestion, a story where myth, loss, and landscape intermingle until they are indistinguishable. Tsai’s film positions the supernatural not as an external force but as a living companion to human memory. It lingers in the fog long after the credits roll.
Rating: 8/10
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