The most amusing thing about the ghost haunting the house of the couple Chang Hsu-Chuan (Tony Yang) and Hsu Muhua (Cecilia Choi) is that it prefers the AC temperature to be around 30°C. Movies often indicate the presence of spirits through cold temperatures and cool winds. Maybe this is why the ghost in Mudborn keeps increasing the temperature of the AC. But, by that logic, shouldn't it just turn off the AC? Hsu-Chuan, in one scene, complains that he woke up all sweaty (there was no air conditioning throughout the night). Imagine if Hsu-Chuan and Muhua were forced to wake up like this every morning. That would be the real horror story: getting out of bed dripping even while owning an AC. I suppose one would start begging the ghost to just possess them instead of leaving them hot and soggy.
The spirit in Mudborn, alas, isn't very imaginative. It has seen mainstream horror movies, and it wants to recycle the clichés of those stories. And so you sit through scenes such as one where a CCTV camera tracks something that isn't visible to the human eye. In another instance, a face with a wide, creepy smile suddenly appears in front of the CCTV. Characters vomit, sense that someone is standing behind them, and turn back to find nothing, and since Muhua is pregnant, you can bet that trouble will find its way to the unborn baby.
Shieh Meng-ju's supernatural horror, basically, has no original bone in its body. It attempts to spook the audience with a collection of "Boo!" moments, and the mystery behind a family murder case isn't quite intriguing. The VR element is reduced to a jump-scare-dispensing device, which is a pity. The characters could have used the virtual reality game to solve the central mystery, which would have added excitement to the movie. The reveal, however, comes through that old technique in which an expert shows what happened in the past by using magical skills. That expert, in Mudborn, is A-Sheng (Derek Chang), and he does what characters like him generally do in these stories. That's another problem with Mudborn: the people on the screen are generic. There is no chemistry between Hsu-Chuan and Muhua, while A-Sheng looks like a cool, petulant Gen Z-er who has been forced to work at his father's company (he impatiently walks away from Hsu-Chuan after his class is over, saying that he only gets paid by the hour).
Mudborn could have been a horror movie about a couple who suddenly grasp that being a parent is no joke—it's scary. Or it could have said something about how technology almost blends reality and virtual reality, given that some scenes that at first appear to be happening to the characters in real time are revealed to be unfolding within the VR device. But this merely comes across as a variation of dream sequences that, in this genre, are employed for false jump scares and red herrings (the final shot tries to achieve some emotional meaning, but it falls flat because the movie doesn't offer anything more than two or three cute lines in which Hsu-Chuan refers to Muhua as "dear wife" or "sweet wife" to establish the couple's relationship). It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that one would be better off playing Resident Evil in VR than spending almost two hours on this film. Meng-ju might have wanted to scare you, but he ends up leaving you dissatisfied. The supernatural spirit in this film ultimately makes you realize that there are better spirits out there in better films. Knock on some other door for real thrills.
Final Score- [2.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times