The Lake (2022)

directed by Lee Thongkham

Thailand

105 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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This was something I was peripherally aware of for a while and interested in as an up-and-coming giant monster movie, but I didn't know too much about it aside from having seen someone claim it was "scarier than The Host". Also, I love that super generic tagline: "A Monster Will Rise". It certainly does! If all you get out of this is "scary giant monster movie", though, then I feel like you may have missed its underlying message - which, ironically, is also the case with The Host.

A voiceover narration at the beginning of the film provides us with some context about the world all of this is taking place in - that is to say, our world. The appearance of a monster is very much tied to the general unbalancing of nature, of climate change and the human sphere rapidly falling into chaos due to our own actions. Whether or not it's stated outright, this kind of thing is implicit in many, many monster movies: the monster as representation of a failing of things we've taken for granted about modern life, as a visual and physical indication that it's all falling apart. After a spectacular introduction to our monster, which I will address further later in this review, we start off on a farm (side note: more goats in this film than expected) where a little girl finds an unusually large egg and, unthinking, removes it from the water, causing its kin to come looking for it and venture into the middle of civilization where their presence wreaks havoc.

This movie is way more personal about its monster-on-human violence than a lot of monster movies dare to be, especially when the monster in question is huge. But to be fair, the huge one isn't the only monster here; there's a second, closer-to-human-sized, mostly bipedal creature who is the one that does most of the up-front killing. It's really brutal: we watch the characters flee from this creature as it flings other people aside ruthlessly, smashing them with its tail or its claws, carving its way through all of the farm workers until eventually the main-ish characters manage to escape to a hospital, telling their story about what they've seen (and not being believed at first, as is par for the course). The violence of this smaller monster initially raises some questions about what seems to be the core message of the film: how can we see ourselves in something that is mercilessly gouging its way through humans? But that's the truth of the whole thing, isn't it? I feel like this isn't a movie where the point is that humans vs. monsters is a one-sided battle; the monster isn't supposed to be a poor, misunderstood, helpless creature (although we do relentlessly misunderstand it), it's supposed to be like us, and we're like it. We're capable of senseless violence, sometimes to protect our own young, sometimes for no reason. So this movie is not asking us "You've just seen this monster kill all of your coworkers and your children, but please, have some sympathy for it", it's asking us "What parts of yourself do you see in what this monster is doing?" Are we ready to face that?

(Or maybe it's asking us none of this, and this is just extrapolation. But if I can't interpret art then what is art for? And what am I for?)

Okay, so let's talk about some good-looking monsters. I was extremely impressed with the first look we get of The Lake's lake creature - it is beautiful, rain-soaked and lumbering, huge and unaffected. The influences on its appearance are clearly all over the map, from aquatic creatures to dinosaurs to other monsters from other monster movies (can you feel the self-control it's taking me not to reference Godzilla in this review?), and in some frames, not in all of them, but in some of them, it looks so plausibly like a real creature that it gave me one of those moments of awe at the state of modern CGI. Unfortunately not all of it is that good, and I have a feeling that those early shots of the big monster are only as convincing as they are because of the pouring rain and darkness masking some of its rougher edges. I have to say I didn't care for the smaller monster nearly as much as I did the bigger one, and this is where you see a lot of the things that CGI can't quite smooth over, because you see it in daylight, moving at a much quicker pace than the big monster. The big one looks so real because its movements are so slow that it doesn't have the opportunity to look fake; there's not many actual life-forms that lumber around at that size, so we don't have a frame of reference to compare it to and think "boy, that looks nothing like a real animal". We're used to seeing stuff run around, and we're not as used to seeing stuff lumber, so it's easier to get away with faking lumbering. The smaller one runs and lopes and is far more motile, and looks less convincing because of that. In my opinion CGI hasn't gotten to the point where it can imitate a real creature's walk cycle perfectly - there's always something that looks unnatural, either too smooth or too jerky. I also just like the idea of a huge monster doing damage more than a littler one getting up close and personal. But the "up close and personal" is kind of the point of this film.

There's a couple of different human characters throughout this and none of them really feels like the "main" one. The one who gets the most focus on his personal backstory is (unfortunately) the cop and his recalcitrant teenage daughter. Cops with recalcitrant teenage daughters are a constant across all forms of media from all countries, and although the injection of a personal angle in a movie where most of the characters don't go beyond the surface level is probably a good thing, I was still bored by this because I see it too many times. Another thing this movie does more than expected is that thing you see in monster movies sometimes where they dedicate a few seconds to a totally clueless bystander's reaction just for comic relief: a guy with earbuds is oblivious to the carnage around him, a woman gripes about the "traffic" as people run and scream past her car, a couple snipping at each other get distracted by the huge beast about to crush their car. It's funny, and I wouldn't say The Lake overdoes this, but... it kind of gets close.

I will admit I don't fully understand the ending. I think I get the vibe, and it's something I love to see in monster movies - alternative solutions to a life post-monster than just "kill it real hard" - but if you asked me to explain it to you, I couldn't. Honestly, this movie feels like it ends around minute 80. What was happening then seemed so final that I was beginning to wonder if maybe this was just one of those movies that have ridiculously long end credits. The brunt of the film takes place over a very small slice of time, one panicked day or portion of a day when a bunch of people experience something weird and impossible, and then there's about 20 minutes of aftermath. It's interesting how the official police line is just to deny that anything happened, and it's also interesting how the film itself doesn't fully demonize anyone for this - there's no real individual human failure here, the end message is just a kind of whole-scale realization that humanity is looking at nature wrong and that this is going to come back and bite us (literally). The police chief who cements the official story that nothing happened is not necessarily a bad person, he's just doing the only thing he thinks is right; he's got family, he's seen horrific things, and this is his reaction. Our cop dad disagrees with this so much that he quits, but it's not a moment of hard feelings, just an irreconcilable difference. Faceted, measured stuff, not the knee-jerk macho yelling you expect out of cops.

There's stuff I didn't like in this and stuff I liked a lot but overall I think it's good because it's a new direction for a monster movie to go in. I would not expect anything less from Thailand's movie industry, which has produced some iconic horror films as well as multiple filmmakers who have pioneered and changed cinema in a more experimental direction. I recommend this but not if you're just looking to get scared. You have to think about it too.

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.

The Medium (2021)

directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun

Thailand, South Korea

131 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I was extremely excited for this. It seemed like every mention of it I saw online was someone calling it the scariest movie they'd ever seen, and I'd heard so much high praise for it that it became one of my most anticipated of the year. And... well. I definitely won't say it disappointed me, but with hype like that, I guess it's hard to meet expectations. This was a good movie, but not the non-stop thrill ride I was hoping it might be. That might just be personal preference, because possession horror doesn't do anything for me. And before I start, I want to be clear: Scariness is not the metric by which I measure a horror film's quality. It never will be. But in this case, I'm focusing on the scare factor because that's specifically what The Medium is getting so much buzz for.

So the movie starts slowly, with a documentary crew introducing their subject, a woman living in the rural hills of Thailand who is the village's main shaman, possessed bodily by a god called Bayan. The place where she lives is rife with gods, they inhabit every little object and represent any and every occasion, and the villagers live with this as part of daily life, it's a neutral fact. I enjoyed how low-key this was, because in many films that focus on folk religion or tradition, they kind of invent an aesthetic that's so far removed from actual practice that it's like that awful Annabelle doll: So obviously creepy-looking that it can't pass for anything anybody ever created on purpose. The wide and inscrutable pantheon is left opaque, and although I don't believe spirituality is supposed to be the antagonist of The Medium, the way the villagers seem to be entirely at the whim of whatever forces they pray to is an unsettling takeaway.

It's quite a long movie, and it feels like it's divided into two distinct halves. Because of the length, you spend a lot of time getting acquainted with each of those halves, and when the first shifts into the second, it's genuinely great; the feeling of going into unfamiliar territory is disquieting and only gets worse as the film goes on. But at the same time, you start getting used to the film repeatedly reaching for new levels of horror, and so it becomes what feels like a contest with itself to see how over-the-top it can get. The first half of the movie is, in my opinion, the best, because it's not trying too hard and it's still eerie: The possession is subtle and, above all, relatable, because what's happening to Mink, the possessed girl, isn't the neck-swiveling, white-eyed melodrama of a typical possession film - it's shown as a bodily thing. It almost appears like she's having a miscarriage despite not being pregnant. She goes through horrific pain in her stomach and other areas, she bleeds heavily and vomits, but worst of all are the behavioral changes, horribly public and extremely embarrassing actions that she isn't in control of. This is one of the most frightening parts of the film because it's uncomfortable to imagine losing control of your body and your personality in such a fast and unstoppable way.

But like I said, this is a movie that ramps up and then keeps ramping up and doesn't stop. The possession goes from blood and pain to a state where nothing of the girl's original self remains. During the tail end of the second half, night vision is used heavily, and this is about where the film started losing me. It tries so hard to show things that are repulsive, disgusting acts that could only be done by a demon or somebody with no humanity left, that it almost becomes boring. Again, it is not so bad as many a possession film. The horrible acts committed by the girl under the influence of whatever that was aren't played up with cheesy evil laughter and overly-long speeches about the demon's loathing for puny humans. But it is sustained for so long and without stopping that I became used to it and then it was no longer interesting.

The found-footage element is by far the weakest aspect of the whole thing. I was really hoping it would play a bigger part, because I love found-footage films and the good ones are some of the creepiest horror movies I know. But it's woefully underused, and flat-out illogical considering the events of the end; there's not even a "these people all died and then we found their tapes blah blah" title card, the narrative just flouts logic without notice. There is also B-roll that looks far more professional than the rest of the film, and background music during tense scenes, two things that take away any real purpose to having a found-footage aesthetic.

The strongest point is that everybody in this is a really good actor. All the things I said about the ways that this differs from lesser possession films are mostly down to Narilya Gulmongkolpech, the actress who plays Mink, doing such an unbroken and relentless job portraying her. It's hard to believe she's a first-time actress, but I think maybe her "normal girl" vibe makes her spiral into possession more palpable. She shifts from being an average, somewhat bored-seeming young girl to something deeply evil so well that it's believable even while much of the rest of the film is not. And the people around her, although they don't have to shoulder the task of playing a possession victim, also feel real, and their sadness and fear feels real too.

All in all, I don't think there's that much wrong with this movie. It's very good and it's unlike a lot of other Thai horror I've seen. I usually don't like to generalize like that, but I'm doing it to make a point in this case, because not that many Thai horror films make it out of the country and into the international spotlight, and those that do are not like this one. I definitely picked up on influences from The Wailing, especially in the big finale exorcism scene, which could have been even longer and more intense in my opinion. I loved this as a horror movie and as a movie in general but I was let down by believing it would be far more frightening than it was.

Shutter (2004)

directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun & Parkpoom Wongpoom

Thailand

97 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This was one of the first horror movies I ever watched a long, long time ago, but I've been meaning to rewatch it because I first saw it under less-than-ideal circumstances. I'm not an evangelist for the theater-going experience, but no movie deserves to be watched on an iPad 2 (on portrait mode) in an uncomfortable desk chair in somebody else's crowded office. I also very recently saw Banjung Pisanthanakun's latest movie The Medium, but to be honest I see few similarities between the two films, and this one had a different screenwriter as well.

As I've mentioned before, analog horror is my favorite thing. Any film where the haunting or otherwise supernatural event central to the plot has to do with the physical medium of film, or any technology that has now been streamlined out of existence, is inherently fascinating to me. You (or at least I) don't notice it that much when you're watching Shutter, because it really feels like a movie that could have come out this year, but it hinges on technology that, while not entirely defunct yet, is slowly disappearing. The protagonist can't immediately see that he's captured a ghost on film; he has to physically go to a print shop and get his pictures developed (or otherwise develop them himself in his home darkroom). This, to me, is infinitely more terrifying than waving your phone around and being able to instantly see ghosts through the screen. The element of waiting and being uncertain if there's things around you that you can't perceive, but can perceive and possibly harm you, is much more potent than the instant gratification of digital photography.

This is one of those movies that has such a stellar concept that I feel like it would have made an amazing short film, but a lot gets added in to make it a normal runtime, and while the depth of the plot doesn't ruin the movie, it does make the central idea - capturing ghosts on film - less central. We know from the start that the protagonist is not the best guy, but for a while we're still able to put ourselves in his shoes, and that alone is upsetting - who can say what they would do if they ran somebody down on the road by accident? We all hope that we would stay and help, and most of us probably would, but people are unpredictable when their panic instinct kicks in. It's oft-used horror fodder to have somebody become haunted for a one-time mistake that eventually overtakes their life, no matter how big or small. But as the story unfolds we gradually become more and more aware that the main character is not just somebody who did the wrong thing under pressure, he's been actively making bad choices and hurting people in the events that happened before the start of the film. This is not a movie where the horrific message comes from the possibility that any small mistake could cause you to become haunted. This is a movie that shows the awful side of humanity, that follows the descent of a terrible person into the depths of the retribution he deserves.

The only conceivable way I could compare this to The Medium would be that they both get much more intense in their second halves, but like The Medium, Shutter is way better when it's more subtle. There's a vibe to this. It's very laid-back when it's not being terrifying, and the easygoing way that the non-involved characters (like the print shop guy) interact with the protagonist show us there's a world that exists outside of the crises the film's characters are having, which is something horror movies don't do a lot. When I think about this movie, even before this last rewatch, the thing that has always stuck in my mind isn't the end, when the protagonist is finally able to see his ghost without the aid of a camera, but his lingering neck pain throughout the film. I don't know what it is about that small sideline of the story, executed with no real need for CGI, that is so lastingly creepy. Feeling something and knowing it's there but not being able to get anyone else to corroborate it or gather enough proof to show it to someone else is something I feel like we've all experienced at some point, not just in the context of a haunting.

There's a reason why this is a cult classic. It's a good movie. Despite one baffling and totally unnecessary scene of comedy relief that felt like I'd stopped watching the movie and started watching a parody of it, Shutter manages to keep up the scare factor steadily and even work in a "plot twist" (some call it a twist, but I think it's more like a slow reveal). It doesn't do a thorough, academic-level deep dive into any one subject, but its themes of personal responsibility, character, and ghosts on film all work together to make something that still stands out as unique today.