Incantation ending explained: How did Li Ronan get rid of the curse?

Kevin Ko's Incantation, widely regarded as the scariest Taiwanese film of all time, made its international debut on Netflix on July 8, 2022. It brought along the creeps of an age-old curse, paired with a dose of visual realism owing to its found-footage format.

While the film did not clarify or overtly explain the "curse" or its cure, this element helped maintain the originality and mystery surrounding the otherwise tried-and-tested methods of bringing out the scares. Multiple dreadful imageries, varying effects of the curse on different people, and a to-and-fro timeline from present to past may leave viewers scratching their heads over what happened at the end.

Though Kevin Ko's intention may have been to keep things undeciphered by the end of Incantation, we'll try our best to unravel the mystery, or at least our interpretation of it.

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Incantation ending explained: Diluting the curse to make it less severe

The first unsettling sequence in Incantation saw Li Ronan (Tsai Hsuan-yen) address the viewers directly and make them recite a certain chant along with showing them visuals of a symbol. The scene, though unsettling, did not make much sense until the film reached its closing minutes.

The majority of the film followed Li-Ronan's efforts to save her daughter, Dodo (Huang Sin-ting), from a curse that she and her two friends mistakenly invoked while investigating a cult.

The trio's misadventure was only revealed in the last quarter of the film, which also showed how the curse was awakened. As they invoked the the wrath of the ancient curse, the cave turned into some sort of horror house, with hands protruding from walls, objects crumbling down, and the entire cave coming alive to take on the humans who disturbed it.

After solving a series of puzzles, Li Ronan concluded that the secret of the curse lies in the lost video footage, discovering that they were cursed for seeing the face of a deity inside the cave. She also linked it to a Yunan text, the interpretation of which led her to believe that the curse would be diluted as more and more people are cursed. She also fixed the things her two friends had tampered with when they visited the cave in a past timeline, restoring the cave to its original setting.

So, Li Ronan made the video and tricked her viewers into reciting the chant and seeing the face of the deity in hopes that the curse would spread among more and more people, making it extremely diluted. However, entering the cave and doing what she did eventually resulted in her death.

The final moments of Incantation showed that Dodo was alright, despite losing her mother and foster father. The last scene made it clear that Li Ronan's plan worked, proving her theory of the curse to be correct. The film ended with another footage of Dodo well and alive, recovering from her critical medical condition.

Incantation is now streaming on Netflix.