Bring me the heads of horror filmmakers, for this Halloween Thai cinemas are auspiciously crawling with ghosts. Two new Thai films — one passably creepy, the other disappointing — are in theatres to supply a spook fix during this demon-infested weekend; there are rotten-faced zombies and posthumous vengeance, and hysterical possession and haunted infrastructure (hospital, house, factory, bathroom, you name it). Lately, Thai horror movies aren't getting high readings on the scare-o-meter, and yet in the land of a million spirit houses, ghosts still reign as a sound business venture and cinematic catalyst. Of the two new films, the more thought-out and carefully-scripted is The Eyes Diary, directed by Chookiat Sakveerakul. By his standard — Chookiat made the grisly 13 Beloved and teen romance The Love Of Siam — the new film is a minor exercise. The Eyes Diary sets out to probe a litany of themes — guilt, love, sacrifice, fatal obsession — but as one of Thailand's most reliable scriptwriters, I only wish Chookiat would've twisted them harder and darker.
The Eyes Diary
Starring Parama Im-anothai, Focus Jeerakul. Directed by Chookiat Sakveerakul. In Thai with English subtitles.
The film is about a young man's implacable mania for seeing ghosts. Nott (Parama Im-anothai) has lost his girlfriend Pla (Focus Jeerakul) in a motorcycle crash in which he was the rider. Guilt-ridden, Nott finds work in a body-removing unit — those guys with fast vans who rush to crime scenes and auto accidents to collect fresh corpses — and begins collecting dead peoples' objects as souvenirs, in the hope that they will open a portal to the world of the dead. The beaten-up keywords of Thai spiritual beliefs are mingled with horror flick clichés: the ghost has "unfinished business", and both the living and the dead have "burdens" that need to be relieved before they can R.I.P.
Love puts a bittersweet head-note to the grim story — Nott wants to meet his girl even though she's dead and buried — and again this post-life romance is an age-old element in Thai Buddhist-inflected ghost stories dealing with the crook of karma and the sour side effects of corporeal attachment. Spooky? Just enough. The intensity of fear isn't as satisfying as Chookiat's first feature film Pisaj (Evil, 2004), with its clever manipulation of space (a Thai-style shophouse) and disquieting quiver, and which proved then that it was possible to spin new tricks from the old genre. The Eyes Diary has ideas that service the story but that are cast aside too quickly. Chookiat is a sensitive, competent filmmaker who's made better films on the subject of teen troubles; here he tries to dovetail that into a ghost narrative, and the result is just sufficient for our weekly dose of fright.
Which means it's still way more than what the other Thai ghost film offers: Rak, Luang Lorn (The Couple) feels like a half-baked pumpkin unsalvageable by the editors' knife. It's curious enough that the directorial credit is a non-specific entity called "Talent One Team" (Talent One is a production company affiliated with Major Cineplex), and the film itself registers no discerning style or theme, except maybe a possession scene that looks more funny than scary.
I don't want to reveal too much, though there's nothing much to reveal anyway. The film opens with a wedding during which the bride discovers the hanged body of one of her in-laws. After that, the ghost terrorises a factory owned by three siblings (one of them is the groom of the wedding) looking for — guess what? — revenge.
The selling point, I believe — though I'm not sure there is any — is the two leading stars whose faces adorn the thousand posters. Pichaya "Golf" Nithipaisankul and Sucha "Aom" Manaying play the spooked newlyweds. They're not very convincing as husband and wife, and even as real people, unless I utterly failed to grasp what people are like these days. It's not entirely their fault; the film suffers from a feeble script that fails to tick the basic checklist of any ghost story, such as suspense, ambience, and the willingness to be silly and trashy, because that's what horror movies are all about. The Couple takes itself too seriously, which means it's difficult for us to do the same.
Rak, Luang Lorn (The Couple)
Starring Pichaya Nithipaisankul, Sucha Manaying. Directed by Talent One Team. In Thai with English subtitles.
