Mudborn
2025 · Directed by Shieh Meng-ju
Original language: Chinese
- horror
- thriller
The story
Hsu-Chuan, who works at a game company, accidentally brings home a broken clay doll from a haunted house while developing a new horror VR game. Unexpectedly, his pregnant wife, Mu-Hua, a cultural relic restorer, develops an obsession with the doll and relentlessly tries to repair it. As strange things begin to happen in the house, Mu-Hua's condition deteriorates, and Hsu-Chuan, at his wits' end, seeks help from a spiritual medium, Ah-Sheng. Meanwhile, the horrifying secret hidden behind the clay doll begins to surface.
What it’s like
Quiet domestic unease that tightens into dread: a couple's apartment slowly fills with wrongness as a cracked clay doll is brought indoors and an obsessive, half-broken repair takes over. The mood is anxious and creeping, with the tension built from small household disturbances rather than spectacle, and the horror thriller pacing favours mounting pressure over release. The emotional core is a husband's helplessness as his pregnant wife's condition worsens, which gives the unease a painful, personal weight. It suits a late-night watch alone or a viewer who likes slow-burn supernatural suspense, where the question is less what is happening than how far it will go. Expect psychological strain and eerie escalation rather than constant shocks, with the intensity carried by implication and the uncanny. Best for people who want a supernatural thriller about grief-tinged fear, marital strain and a secret that surfaces slowly, and who are comfortable with a dark, unsettling ending of the kind horror thrillers tend to favour.
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