Pee Mak (2013)

directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun

Thailand

111 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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I wanted to see this because I had read somewhere that it was Thailand's highest-grossing film, has won a whole host of awards, and been nominated for many more. I'm not sure if that's still true at the time of writing, but it's interesting to me when a country's top film is a horror movie, because in the U.S., where I am, there's still enough bias against horror that horror films have very little chance of getting any kind of recognition in awards shows, much less netting enough to break the records of non-genre titles. That a horror movie has gotten this popular may point to an overall different feeling towards horror in Thailand - or maybe people just really, really like this one movie. This director is single-handedly responsible for pretty much every famous Thai horror movie of the last two decades, so there's that to consider as well.

The movie takes place in the mid-19th century, so this is still Siam. Specifically, it is supposed to be during the reign of King Mongkut, which would put it somewhere between 1851 and 1868. It does not seem like the film is making any solid attempts at historical accuracy whatsoever, although I can't speak about that too much because whoever subtitled it was doing their damnedest to translate things that were specific to Thai culture into something recognizable to English-speakers (there is a particular pun made during a charades game where the effort of making it understandable in English is truly commendable), but to me nothing about this felt antique. However, while probably not the most accurate, the ambiance is really fun anyway. Everything looks deliberately constructed to appear rural and sometimes ramshackle, and it may not pass for a genuine village circa the mid-1800s, but it looks cool. I wanted to walk through the sets like I was going through a little museum exhibit. There's something to be said for the value of making something look believable versus the value of making something look aesthetically pleasing.

Our cast of characters is five goof-off soldiers with variously complicated hairstyles, and the first few minutes of the film are spent with them looking like they're on death's door in the middle of a losing battle during the war that was happening at the time (there were many). At the last minute, the film cuts to them all more or less recovered from the most grievous of their wounds and back home to visit the titular character Mak's wife, Nak, and their infant son Dang. No explanation is immediately given for how they could all be looking doomed one minute and fine the next, but the villagers sure seem terrified of them and Nak...

It should be said that this is not a straight horror movie, it's also a comedy, and unfortunately the style of humor is a kind that I personally find exhausting and unfunny. Nothing can be serious for more than a minute or two, after that there has to be some obligatory gag from the peanut gallery to break up the tension. None of the humor is really offensive; there's a poop joke here and there, somebody makes a crack about Nak's period, and one of them ends up dressed like a woman at some point, but nothing that's actively mean, just groan-worthy. And too frequent. Having this constant need for one of the five guys to display that they're dumb or want to flirt with Mak's wife every couple of minutes takes away from feeling like you're immersed in the story. These are just my sensibilities, though - I know from this director's other horror works that there does tend to be a lot of humor injected in at weird times. Even in Shutter, which is otherwise a serious and extremely tense film, I recall a really oddly-placed "guy in drag" joke.

Really the big problem with this movie is that it drags and drags in getting to the point. This is based off of a folktale which has a fairly simple idea behind it, so there's not too much in the way of "point" anyway, and you can tell that stretching out an idea to an hour and fifty-one minutes is why there's so much faffing about in haunted houses and dancing around things. The whole reason why this movie is so long is because Mak's friends are all too nice (or very possibly too scared) to tell him that his wife is a ghost, and Mak is too in love with her to realize. Later it becomes "Mak's friends are all too nice/scared to tell Mak he's a ghost", and then eventually "Mak's friends are all too nice/scared to admit that they might all be ghosts". It's a complicated thing, dying during wartime. So everybody basically continues to get into overly convoluted scenarios due to their avoidance of either Nak herself or out of a lack of the brain cells required to figure out how to tell Mak that he's surrounded by ghosts.

Mak and Nak are also genuinely cute together. When the humor comes from a guy loving his wife too much to realize that she might be dead, and ultimately not caring that much if she really is, it's hard to get mad at it. Mario Maurer just has such an honest face and does so well cast as the most innocent and normal of the five buddies that it's a reprieve from everybody else going to slapstick town constantly.

Because this is in the hands of somebody with a proven horror track record, the scant creepy bits hit all the right notes, even though there's much less of that than there is bad jokes. There's this one scene where one of the gang is trying to get up the rickety wooden stairs to Nak's house after already having had a bad dream involving him doing that very thing, and he just blows out all the steps, fully smashes through them so he has to hoist himself up bodily to get to the top, and his reward when he does is seeing Nak's arm reach down to pick up a fruit off the ground - while the rest of Nak should be on the second floor of the house. This genuinely felt like a nightmare. The specific feeling of not being able to climb stairs is something that is common in nightmares - spatial dimensions no longer working the way they should and places either being too big or your body being too small is a signature of unsettling dreams. The effect of Nak's inhumanly long limbs is done really well, and even still looks good when we see it full-frontally, requiring the use of practical effects. I just wish there was more of that and less Scooby Doo business. This was fun, though, I enjoyed experiencing it as somebody unfamiliar with the story behind it and the historical setting in general.