Suffocation (OVERLOOK) Sucks the Life Out of Pedestrian Supernatural Horror

Title: Suffocation

First Non-Festival Release: TBD

Director: Louis Chan, Stone Chang

Writer: Ken Chang

Runtime: XX Minutes

Starring: Ai-Ning Yao, Meng Hsuan Chu, Chun Hong, Rainie Dun

Where to Watch: Check out where to find it here

This film’s review was written after its screening at the Overlook Film Festival in 2026.

School is challenging for many reasons. Balancing academics, extra curriculars, social commitments, and life in general, it is understandable that teenagers can struggle to handle the pressure. While less understandable, this sort of environment can lead to kids doing terrible things to one another. For survival, payback, or even social status, the reasons to justify cruelty don’t condone but rather explain why children act the way they do when the opportunity arises.

It’s the last day of school before break and police arrive on scene after the early-morning discovery of a dead body in a high school swimming pool. Rumors swirl of a teacher-student relationship that led to the death. A group of high school swimmers stay the night to study in an empty classroom, as their grades determine if they will play or not. Soon after, strange things begin happening and the group finds themselves locked in the building. With no way out and pursued by a terrifying, unseen force that is manipulating them and their surroundings, the group must work together to survive the night and unfurl the mystery of why this is happening to them.

The ideas of Suffocation are much cooler than its tired approach to horror despite its innovative camerawork.

A haunting in almost real-time, Suffocation plays out as if it was one single, unbroken shot relying on the unique SteadiCam technology to make the visuas pop. While this isn’t a new development in terms of horror, it is a difficult feat to achieve, nonetheless. Suffocation does so with aplomb, gliding through its sinister story of the supernatural with enough atmosphere and intensity to make the horror engaging. Allowing the psychological terror to unfold in real time makes it so Suffocation sinks under the skin sooner and places audiences in the shoes of its characters. A few well-executed scares make up for its otherwise pedestrian story.

Unfortunately, this is where the positives of Suffocation end. Its biggest obstacle is crafting its story. Listless in direction, the story takes far too long to develop for the type of film Suffocation wants to be. Pacing itself without restraint, Suffocation stumbles any time it has to speed up or slow down. All the pieces of the mystery are present at the beginning, and it doesn’t take a genius to see where it will lead. That’s the problem. Despite it keeping its reveals close to its chest, it’s plain to see what will happen rather quickly.

That’s where Suffocation stumbles further, declining to latch onto any interesting thread to tie its narrative together, it flounders through a sequence of increasingly tiring scares. Petty squabbles and one-dimensional characters make the action even blander. Without anything driving the film other than ‘don’t die,’ Suffocation hints at a greater reveal through a morality lesson that sinks it further. Unfortunately, the revelations are ordinary for a film of this nature, so in the end Suffocation just feels like a well-executed but forgettable nightmare.

The production design of Suffocation allows the scares to take shape even when the story doesn’t permit it. Long, shadowy corridors, empty courtyards, and pitch-black classrooms help build the atmosphere while establishing the setting of the sprawling complex. There’s an inherent creepiness to schools at night, but Suffocation takes it further without going over the top. Brief moments like the never-ending staircase and the basement boiler room switch up demonstrate that Suffocation has plenty of cool ideas, it just doesn’t execute them all properly.

Constrained by its story and not necessarily its ideas, Suffocation chokes out mild, familiar supernatural horror for the masses. Its generic story and flat characters take away from its kinetic sense of action and well-constructed scares. Fans of East Asian horror cinema may find more mileage out of the haunter but otherwise there isn’t anything that makes Suffocation truly stand out from the crowd.

Overall Score? 5/10