Past Misdeeds: The Sisters (2004)

Original title: Pee chong air

Pim (Linina Phuttitarn), the last surviving member of a small-time band, explains to a (up until the movie's very end faceless) cop what happened to her and her band mates when they spent a night in a hotel in the country.

At first, they were only somewhat disturbed by peculiar and unsettling noises coming through the air vent in the ceiling, but soon they learned that they shared a room with a very angry female ghost staring at them from above. Escaping into the lobby didn't help much. In fact, one of them got so panicked by further ghostly manifestations in an elevator shaft that he ran out of the hotel and right into a car.

You'd hope that leaving the hotel would protect the young people from the ghost's wrath, but unfortunately she followed them to the hospital their run over friend was brought into to die. The ghost was also bringing one of these especially disturbing child ghosts with her, so it’s not surprising the next band member died in the hospital by ghost-induced suicide.

At least the less frightening ghost of a teenage girl appeared and helped the band (and us) out with some exposition. The ghost following them around belonged to a murdered prostitute whose head was deposited in the air vent the ghost initially crawled out of. Teenage ghost was her sister.

Thusly informed, our victims - having no time for scepticism – decided the safest course of action was to seek help in the nearest Buddhist temple. The head priest there already had experience with this particular ghost, and was able to tell our protagonists that whoever sees her soon dies or goes insane. He did, however, know of a ritual that could help lift this curse - but he needed everyone to sleep in the coffin of someone who died a violent death as a part of it, and it had to happen before midnight.

The whole ritual business did not work out as well as the friends had hoped, of course, and the next day found the two last survivors doing research like good Call of Cthulhu characters, delving deep into the sad and tragic past of the ghost and the rather distressing present of her family.

The seeming randomness of the supernatural attacks on the protagonists and a general feeling of inexplicability of the first half hour of The Sisters reminded me heavily of the work of Takashi Shimizu circa the original (well, original big screen) Ju-On. Director/editor/cinematographer Tiwa Moeithaisong (who directed the fantastic Meat Grinder in 2009) uses visual techniques that reminded me a lot of Shimizu - long shots from strangely disturbing angles that suggest something malevolent abound, camera movement that is slow and lingering like a paranoiac's dream.

Less Shimizu and more Moeithaisong as I learned to love him in Meat Grinder are the at this early point more confusing than illuminating fragments of flashbacks (inside of the flashback that is Pim's story for an extra dose of confusion) and the excellently artificial colour schemes in which Bava-green of course indicates the cracks through which the supernatural seeps. All this combines nicely into a feeling of losing touch with linear reality in a receptive viewer like me, so I have to admit I was a little disappointed when the ghost began to make sense.

Explanations in horror films always carry a risk of pushing the viewer out of the realm of the unexplained and creepy into the less dignified castle of ridiculousness, but Moeithaisong avoids falling into this trap by the matter-of-factness with which his film delivers its answers. Elements like the "sleeping in the coffin of a someone who died a violent death" business or the expository ghost sister should be plain ridiculous, yet the simple, underplayed earnestness with which they are presented makes them - if not exactly belonging into reality as I understand it - perfectly fitting elements of the story.

It is also illuminating to see how far a film can come without having psychologically defined characters or clear character types in it. Apart from one of them, the band members have no distinguishing character traits whatsoever, yet I found them less annoying than the usual assortment of jock, nerd, slut and good girl that typically make up horror film victims. They don't need to have more specific characterization because their characters or motivations have nothing to do with what happens to them, and their actions before they meet the ghost are utterly unimportant. These people are as doomed as soon as they step into the hotel room as the woman who would become the film's ghost was doomed through the accidents of birth (or karma, I suppose).

In the end, the only character whose psychology the film explains or is interested in is the ghost, and her psychology it explains in such a roundabout way a viewer has to work to comprehend it.


If a viewer doesn't want to put that work in, she will probably still be able to enjoy The Sisters as a solid piece of contemporary Asian horror.