Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo
Director: Tsai Chia Ying
Starring: Jasper Liu, Angela Yuen, Tsao Yu Ning
Lien Chao’s Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo follows Chia Ming (Liu) and his girlfriend Yu-hsin (Yuen), whose journey to a secluded mountain becomes a spiralling, repeating nightmare after they encounter a mythical yellow raincoat-wearing ghost in the mountains. What starts as a ghost story evolves into something much more intricate - a grief-fueled loop of death, ritual, and reckoning - as Chia Ming must work out how to end the time loop if he is to save Yu-hsin, himself, and maybe a few others too…
"The film starts strong, with its first half full of intrigue, shocks, and ample mystery, but it’s in the final act and mid-credits twist where the film stumbles."
The film is a visually compelling and emotionally dense one that blends spiritual folklore, grief, and time-loop mechanics into a haunting tale set in the mountains. It’s intriguing, and, at times, unnerving, but it’s also frustrating enough to keep it from excellence.
Chao’s decision to utilise music sparingly and instead focus on the sound design was inspired, and Chun-Lin Chang’s cinematography helps to further elevate the presentation - especially the beautifully shot scenes in the fog-shrouded woods. The sequences of pure horror are patient, starkly presented, and filled with existential dread rather than jump scares, and are spread throughout the story in a way that ensures each one packs a punch when it arrives.
Liu delivers a heartfelt performance, quietly grounding the surrealism with anguish and resignation. We feel every ounce of sadness within him as the spiral continues, and his desperation to put things right unfolds. Though she has less to do, Angela Yuen provides solid support to Liu.
The film starts strong, with its first half full of intrigue, shocks, and ample mystery, but it’s in the final act and mid-credits twist where the film stumbles. It feels torn between delivering an emotional payoff, focusing on mythological themes, and flawed time-travel logic, and instead of choosing a clear path, the ending throws out a few possible explanations but never fully lands on one.
The mid-credits scene also poses more questions than it answers. It’s a moment that’s emotionally satisfying but narratively murky, and that lack of clarity dulls the film’s emotional backbone. That it doesn’t resolve itself smoothly ensures that it didn’t linger too long in my mind after viewing, when at the halfway point, it seemed like a lock that it would. Instead of feeling mysterious, it comes across as undercooked and overly ambiguous simply for the sake of it.
Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo certainly has depth, and is a film that is moody, introspective, and respectfully reverent of tradition. It just needed a firmer grip on its own mythology and logic to support its emotional story, and back up the well-formed atmosphere and spiritual dread.
July 28th 2025