San Diego Asian Film Festival 2025
Legend speaks of haunted mountains in Taiwan, where lost hikers are led astray by a ghostly apparition in a yellow slicker, to their deaths.
Time loop horror is a relatively new sub-genre of horror, with movies like Donnie Darko, Happy Death Day, and the recent Until Dawn giving us entries filled with comedy, tragedy, gore and, of course, looped deaths in some of the most horror-ific ways possible. Haunted Mountains dives us deep into Taiwanese ghost culture along with our time loops, so make sure you have a damn flashlight packed, and lets get into this!
So Jia-ming Chen (Jasper Liu) wants very much to marry his doubting girlfriend Yu-xin Song (Angela Yuen), though his decision to ask her while they’re here on the mountain where their close friend and Yu-xin’s former lover An-wei (Tsao Yu-ning) mysteriously disappeared, is kind of ill-advised. Mostly undeterred, Jia-ming and Yu-xin head out to hike the mountain, partially in remembrance of their fallen friend.
Encountering a dead body at 5:45 a.m. or thereabouts is never a good way to start a day, but the authorities appear to have things in hand, and so our couple moves on. Other hikers tell stories among themselves about a massive tragedy that occurred on this particular mountain, where a whole bunch of people died, and because they were never found and buried properly, their vengeful ghosts occupy the mountain and gleefully lead hikers to their rather sudden deaths. But none of that has really entered into Jia-ming’s consciousness yet, for his beloved Yu-xin has died in a seriously violent manner and Jia-ming has looped back to the start of the same freaking day. In the same way we might say, ‘And the penny drops’, we begin again with a single droplet of water on poor Jia-ming’s forehead, and it’s time to do it all over, again.
The movie piece-meals the audience the backstory of our main trio, how some time ago An-wei and Jia-ming and Yu-xin all went hiking on this same mountain. They encountered a forbidden area cut off by bright yellow swathes of fabric and a warning sign, and decided to cross it anyways, witnessing some forbidden magic ritual involving blood-spill, mad priests, and of course, spirits of the dearly departed. Clearly realizing this was something they were never supposed to see, all three of our protags make mistakes in their haste to get away from the forbidden ritual, enraging everyone involved. And as the rain comes down in stinging sheets and An-wei is too wounded to go on, Jia-ming takes Yu-xin to go find help, swearing he’ll come back for his friend, whom he left on the haunted mountain, alone.
Running into another person stuck in a time loop death trap on the mountain is the barest beginning of surprises Jia-ming endures as he gamely takes on the same day, after day, after day, trying desperately to keep his beloved Yu-xin from being killed, or worse, being possessed to kill herself. Jia-ming is forced to take a close look at his and Yu-xin’s recent past, his buried rivalry with An-wei for Yu-xin’s heart, Yu-xin’s own mild reluctance to fully commit to Jia-ming after An-wei’s apparent death, but also, how their collective tunnel-vision on their own selfish desires causes ripple effects to others around them. You can only claim, ‘I didn’t know’, for so long, and those vengeful ghosts haunting the mountain know, and demand, the whole awful truth.
Giving away anything else would do the movie a serious disservice, so we won’t be doing that. Instead, we will rave about the great performances from Liu and Yuen, Jia-ming and Yu-xin respectively; we will appreciate the sparse use of CGI to enhance the atmosphere of the haunted mountain and those malicious ghosts; and we will highly recommend the vicious time loop romp Haunted Mountain: The Yellow Taboo to all horror fans!
Reviewed by Alicia Glass