Director: Banjong Pisanthanakun
Production Company: Showbox, GDH 559, Northern Cross
Country: Thailand, South Korea
Year: 2021
Directed by one half of the Shutter directing duo, and produced by Na Hong-Jin of The Wailing and The Chaser fame, here’s an exorcism mockumentary in the deep rural canopies of Thailand. When a documentary crew goes to film a piece about a local medium, possessed by the spirit of a local god, Bayan, her niece begins to show all the signs of something going wrong, and soon the spirits and demons are coming for the whole family.
I really wanted to like this movie. I love Shutter (wrote an essay on it at Uni) and The Wailing is in my top 5 films of all time. When I saw this film was a thing, I really hoped it would have the skill and expertise to deliver something unique, new, and exciting. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t.
But when the film started and I saw it was a mockumentary, my heart sank. It’s so damn hard to make a good, scary mockumentary/found-footage film, because by default the form positions us in a mid-point between objective and subjective. We have the viewpoint of a character through the handheld in-film camera lens (therefore subjective; we see what they want us to see), but it’s objective because the footage has necessarily been stitched together and compiled into a form which we view from an impartial, observatory position (the film), complete with title cards, cutting, music, sfx, etc. We’re in a kind of limbo, and only with extreme skill can a viewer be guided through this void between experiences to engage with a good narrative presentation that excites us.
What we have, however, is a very beautiful and pretty-looking poor-man’s Wailing, which fails to hit home on almost every level. I tried to get into the film, but the style just didn’t let me in. I’ve never found it easy to like found-footage, and here we see some of the problems. There’s apparently an infinite amount of cameras, with people filming their mates getting eaten without rushing in to help. Sometimes they’re even being eaten themselves and they’re still filming the damn stuff. How’s that meant to work?
And though the acting isn’t bad, the possessed rabid shamans in the finale don’t scare in the way that they’re meant to because the mockumentary form doesn’t allow for the composition, directing, editing, etc etc that a normal, objective narrative film uses to great effect to build suspense and terror, and allow us to forget its people in nappies with ketchup on their faces growling. It tries to pull some of the same moves that The Wailing does, with a twist here and there, clashes of faith etc, but whereas the former was inherently built on the idea of distrusting institutions we look up to, this plays stuff purely for scares, and scared that don’t cut it either.
So although it looks pretty, and although it has many of the same beats and iconographic plot points as one of my favourite films ever, it’s emotionally detached, looks shaky, doesn’t work from a presentation point of view, and I wanted it to be over very, very quickly. I hate that, perhaps even more than I disliked the film. What a damn shame.
Review: 4/10
Review by Kieran Judge
KJudgeMental 