The Unseeable (2006)

Thailand in the 1930s. Pregnant Nualjan (Siraphan Wattanajinda) comes to the country estate of Madame Ranjuan (Suporntip Chuangrangsri), hoping for a charitable place where she can stay for a few weeks and give birth to her child. Nominally, Nualjan is looking for the child's father, who one day went away on business, never to return, though the viewer can't help but be puzzled how she'll be able to find him when she's not actually searching.

Alas, Madame Ranjuan's estate is not the most healthy or sane place for a pregnant young woman to stay in. In spite of the size of the estate, there are nearly no servants to speak of around. Only Ms. Somjit (Tassawan Seneewiongse) - at best the rudest, most class-conscious woman Thailand's - takes care of a lady of the house who never leaves her room anymore on account of a broken heart, while two other welfare cases like Nualjan, Choy and the seemingly mad Grandmother Erb, are the only other people around. The only other living people, that is - there's an overabundance of ghosts around. From shadowy hands grabbing from a shrine, to a lone male lumberjack, to a hanging ghost, to a dead little girl, the place features more ghostly apparitions than the typical episode of Most Haunted.

Things aren't getting any more healthy after Nualjan's child is born. Ranjuan develops something of an obsession with the young woman's child, insisting on seeing and holding it in her room every day. As if this wasn't enough, Nualjan also slowly begins to realize some rather terrible personal truths.

The Unseeable isn't the type of film one would expect from Wisit Satanatieng, the director of Tears of the Black Tiger. It is as much of a stylistic homage to other films as Tears was, but it lacks some of the irony as well as the exuberance of the older film. This has of course a lot to do with the fact that a cross between a melodrama and an old fashioned ghost story doesn't lend itself too well to either of these moods. The film's problem is that there's nothing all that interesting taking the place of these moods, leaving the viewer rather puzzled about what it was meant to achieve.

The first hour of the film or so is fine enough, with some nice old fashioned spook set pieces, a rather minimalist but effective evocation of period detail (ah, the class consciousness is downright painful) and perfectly nice acting.

Afterwards, it all breaks down under the type of flaws I have by now seen to often in promising pieces of Asian horror: there is of course The Twist, not as annoying as it could be here (at least it fits the themes of the movie well), but still at once too obvious and too badly constructed to be satisfying. Then there's the bombardment with supposedly scary scenes in ever increasing frequency, until one can't help but giggle at every new ghost which appears - and there's really a lot of them, as if Satanatieng had thought to himself: "Well, ten ghosts are a lot scarier than one, right?". It also got increasingly more difficult for me to care about the melodrama, for the same reason the scary parts weren't scary anymore. Sometimes too much is simply too much.

 

Technorati-Tags: thai movies,melodrama,horror,wisit satanatieng,reviews