Stills from The Summer Hikaru Died and Incantation
| Photo Credit: Netflix
This week’s picks share the visual grammar of guilt. In one, a boy welcomes home the familiar shadow of his best friend, only to find it hollowed out by something unspeakable. In the other, a mother films herself begging the audience to share a prayer that may save her daughter from a curse. The Summer Hikaru Died and Incantation ( on Netflix) are stories where the act of holding on becomes the most terrifying thing of all, which makes them befitting companions for the Halloween week.
From the drawing board
The first thing you notice in The Summer Hikaru Died is its gorgeous light. It spills across rusting railings, shivers through laundry lines, and hums in the fields under a heat that never breaks. In this shimmering summer calm, a boy named Hikaru walks down from the mountains in a quaint Japanese village after being declared missing. His best friend Yoshiki gradually learns that whatever returned isn’t Hikaru. And yet, he doesn’t tell anyone.
Adapted by CygamesPictures from Mokumokuren’s acclaimed manga, Ryohei Takeshita’s direction thrives on a Lynchian brand of unnerving stillness. The rural quiet makes the intrusion of the supernatural feel obscene, as if something had defiled the air itself, and the camera often holds its gaze until the ordinary begins to rot.
This isn’t horror built on exposition or spectacle, because much like Yoshiki, the series refuses to name its terror. The superstitions and whispers creeping through the forests of Kubitachi feel passed down through generations of trauma. The creature wearing Hikaru’s face learns to mimic tenderness, and Yoshiki, paralysed by love and guilt, lets the imitation live beside him.
A still from ‘The Summer Hikaru Died’
| Photo Credit:
Netflix
In both its aesthetic sensibilities and its themes, The Summer Hikaru Died often recalls Twin Peaks’ melancholic portrait of complicity, as well as the doomed forbidden romance of Luca Guadagnino’s cinema. There’s even a touch of that soft-spoken terror of love in the likes of The Haunting of Hill House.
Foreign affairs
Kevin Ko’s Taiwanese found-footage horror, Incantation, begins with a fourth-wall-breaking plea: a woman looks straight into the camera and asks you to repeat a blessing to help ward off evil from her cursed six-year-old daughter.
Li Ruo-nan, played with hollow-eyed conviction by Tsai Hsuan-yen, once trespassed on a forbidden ritual and has since lived under its shadow. Years later, she documents her attempt to protect her daughter, though every word she speaks draws you further into her orbit.
Ko’s brilliance lies in how he turns us all into participants. He reimagines the found-footage format as some sort of ceremonial trap. It’s a meticulous exercise in complicity that blends the visual claustrophobia of The Blair Witch Project with the folkloric dread of Ringu, that culminates in one of the most terrifying found-footage experiences that I’ve had the (mis)fortune of ever chancing upon.
A still from ‘Incantation’
| Photo Credit:
Netflix
But what anchors it all are the cultural textures of Taiwanese mountain rituals and Yunnan myth, coupled with the uneasy marriage of technology with faith. Incantation feels as if The Wailing had been shot through the handheld panic of REC. The film’s self-consuming guilt shares DNA with Noroi: The Curse and the spiritual disorientation of Hereditary, though its heart beats closer to the detritus of desecration in The Medium.
Both The Summer Hikaru Died and Incantation examine the destructive persistence of love. Together they form the perfect diptych on the human need to steady their faith in the living or the divine, long after both have stopped answering.
Ctrl+Alt+Cinema is a fortnightly column that brings you handpicked gems from the boundless offerings of world cinema and anime.
Published – October 31, 2025 04:41 pm IST
