A diabolical setup rooted in Taiwanese folklore is undone by growing disinterest in what makes Haunted Mountains unique
In Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo, Chia Ming (Jasper Liu) and Yu Hsin (Angela Yuen) venture deep into the mountains of rural Taiwan, where Chia Ming plans to propose. Their relationship is marked by tragedy as much as love, as this same mountain range also marks the area where Yu Hsin’s former boyfriend and Chia Ming’s best friend, An Wei (Tsao Yu Ning), mysteriously disappeared. After a ghostly yellow-raincoated hiker leads them down a hopelessly lost path into the woods, Yu Hsin meets a tragic end–and Chia Ming’s day resets, bringing him and Yu Hsin back to the start of their hike into this forbidden forest. As Chia Ming desperately searches for a way to break the spell, he must confront the supernatural taboos he, Yu Hsin, and An Wei broke before An Wei’s disappearance; the same spirits–and An Wei himself–may be the source of Chia Ming and Yu Hsin’s fatal time loop.
Taiwan has emerged as a source of exciting horror films in recent years, ranging from the skewering (Dead Talents Society), to the sickening (The Sadness), and the downright scary (Incantation). There’s a deep earnestness with which these films interrogate the folklore that still holds modern sway over Taiwan’s horror audiences, and I was excited to see how Tsai Chia-ying’s film followed in the footsteps of its predecessors in bringing a famous Taiwanese urban legend to international prominence.
Haunted Mountains begins with enough eerie promise to hook viewers, opening with its impressively realized central specter’s latest creepy kill and an unexpectedly complex central dynamic between its leads, before revealing the time loop premise we’re set to settle in for. However, whatever engaging elements Tsai sets up are just as surprisingly dismissed or minimized. As shocking as the time loop reveal is, Tsai proceeds to go into montage mode, with Chia Ming hand-waving this reveal in a voiceover before fleeing the film’s once-central forest setting.
What follows feels like more of an excuse for Haunted Mountains to subject Yu Hsin to increasingly absurd and convoluted ways for her to meet a bloody end, all while Chia Ming follows an increasingly stop-and-start mystery that fails to live up to an increasingly bait-and-switch premise. It’s Final Destination without a coherent sense of humor or pacing, and Happy Death Day without engaging leads whose deaths have emotional resonance or growing mastery over the omnipotent evil they initially feel powerless against. Whatever cultural specificity or initial intrigue Haunted Mountains builds with its opening act feels squandered in the resulting pastiche of more memorable and frankly bolder genre fare. By the time the film stops in its tracks to deliver several minutes of leaden exposition, which itself matters little to the eventual conclusion, Haunted Mountains feels like its own cinematic time loop, one we want to escape, but cannot.
As much as I wanted to immerse myself in this initially intriguing supernatural mystery, it was frustrating to see Haunted Mountains get as lost in the woods as its characters–beckoned by the promise of elements that could make for as bold a Horror entry as other recent Taiwanese fare, but too reluctant to follow its ideas into engaging and above all unique territory.
Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo had its international premiere at the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival. It is currently seeking international distribution.
