In short: The Lost Case (2017)

aka Ghost Doctor: The Lost Case

Original title: Mue Prab Samphawesi

Itt (Pradanai Nateprasertkul) and Por (Sirapakorn Sereedonprasert) are junior members of the production team of a Thai paranormal reality TV show in which “Ghost Doctor” Master Pla (Jeerapan Pachrkaw) helps people out with their supernatural problems. Quite a bit of smashing of spirit houses and termite hills generally seem to be involved in his technique, as does something that looks a bit more like traditional South East Asian shamanist spirit-exorcism.

Por and Itt have been sent alone to a small village to explore the case of farmer Chai (Wanlop Saengjoy) whose house may or may not be haunted by the ghost of his daughter, hanging around after a suicide. The whole ordeal has bent something in the mind of Chai’s wife Aueng (Panjai Sirisuwan) – she believes her daughter is alive and well, and just happens to not be around, ever.

Because the arrival of Master Pla is delayed for several days, the TV guys have quite a bit of time to research the haunting, snoop around, and get themselves possessed. The last of which Master Pla, in the tradition of all contemporary occult experts in western movies (Asian films do use this particular trope rather more sparingly) in the last fifteen years, will not actually notice.

I believe The Lost Case (directed by Chayan Itthijatuporn) is the first Thai entry into the annals of the POV horror style I’ve seen, but movies nominally shot by guys and gals shaking their handheld cameras around are quite obviously an international language, so I’m not exactly surprised to encounter one; rather more that it’s taken so long for me to do it.

This particular film is on the more professional side of POV filmmaking, where clearly a degree of thought has been put into the staging and framing of scenes, and where the camera is never shaking, wavering or shimmying so much we can’t actually see what’s freaking out the characters. The filmmakers did hit on the dubious idea of not using the traditional green night vision camera, though, so things get rather to greyish dark a little too often, leading to at least a couple of scenes where the true horror lies in squinting hard enough to see what’s going on.

What is going on is rather traditional POV horror fodder, the ghost in question not really doing much that varies from your generic movie ghost business. Still, there are two, perhaps three, pretty effective scare scenes in here (the hanging scene is particularly creepy), so there are worse ways to spend one’s time than the film’s seventy minutes run time. Plus, at least nobody’s running through the woods or through a ruined industrial building, but rather the sort of Thai village you don’t really get to see in any kind of movie very often, lending The Lost Case a pleasant degree of local colour.