‘Mudborn’ Review: An Uneasy Fusion of Folk Horror and Digital Nightmares (Netflix)

Asian horror cinema has long been closely followed by genre devotees. The way streaming platforms present these films, however, often works against their reach, as they rarely receive enough promotion. That’s why Mudborn comes as a genuine surprise: a solid, effective Taiwanese horror film that taps into the genre’s classic regional traits, blending folk traditions with modernity and technology.

Shieh Meng-ju’s debut centers on a couple who find themselves caught in a series of dangerous circumstances after bringing a clay doll into their home. He, Hsu-chuan, works at a video game company that scans real-life locations to use as backgrounds in their games. She, Mu-hua, is pregnant and restores traditional objects. After an opening sequence in which a “scan” goes wrong, one of the dolls captured in that process ends up in the couple’s house.

What initially seems like a thoughtful gift quickly turns into a nightmare, as—unsurprisingly—the doll comes with a troubling past. From his workplace, he monitors what’s happening at home through a camera, but as the film begins to blur reality, nightmares, and virtual environments, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell whether what we’re seeing is happening in the house, inside the game, or in the characters’ darkest dreams.

In an attempt to make sense of the escalating horrors, the couple brings in Ah-shen, a self-styled exorcist figure familiar with curses and dark rituals. Together, they try to untangle the mystery and survive the increasingly cruel and unsettling attacks. At this point, Mudborn leans perhaps too heavily on a quasi-detective narrative that grows more contrived than expected in its resolution.

What sets the film apart from the many other haunted-doll stories lies in its “spiritual” connection between the real and the virtual. At a certain point, those two realms begin to overlap and merge in unpredictable ways. Add to that a steady stream of jump scares—occurring both in the real world and within the game—and the film manages to carve out some distinctive angles within an otherwise familiar premise.

It’s not a great film—its nearly two-hour runtime feels excessive—but this Taiwanese production offers some genuinely intriguing ideas within a well-worn format. It feels very much like the kind of movie destined for a Hollywood remake. One can only hope that, in such a translation, it doesn’t lose the mystery and the grotesque charm that come from never quite knowing what is real, what is imagined, and what might be part of a very dangerous game.