The VICTIM's ghost joins the cast of the movie based on her life.
be soon on the fast track for a Hollywood remake. That one oddball detail, however, sits at the center of the film, and it would take some savvy rewriting to make the story sensible to Western viewers.
Whereas American prosecu- tors have come to complain about the “CSI Effect” (juries reared on TV procedurals to the point where they expect all crimes to be solved by rigorous forensic science, and are impatient with and skeptical of traditional police work), the state of ratiocination in Thailand is firmly rooted in the era of PERRY MASON. It is a some- what routine matter for major crimes to be re-enacted by the police using their prime suspect, partly as a way of giving the press a juicy photo op and partly to put the accused’s alibis to the test. Why waste your time trying to unravel your perp’s story in some interrogation room when you could hammer at the guy’s psyche in a very direct and visceral way instead?
In January 2008, this curious practice made international headlines when a Thai cop was accused of gunning down a pair of Canadian tourists. When the officer’s account of the incident differed on some key points with those of some of the wit- nesses, and with Thailand’s much vaunted tourist industry at risk, the investigators took the officer to the blood-stained stretch of concrete in question, handed him a toy gun, and had him re-enact his version of things with a pair of his fellow cops play- ing the victims. As the stunned international press corps looked on, the procedure devolved into farce as the “victims” started gig- gling nervously, unable to take the proceedings seriously. This is apparently a common problem with crime scene re-enactments, and it is from this point that the fictional events of THE VICTIM take off.
Hoping to give greater verisi- militude and reliability to their re- enactments, a local Thai police
station hires an aspiring young actress named Ting to take over the duties the laughter-prone detectives couldn’t quite hack. An earnest young thing, Ting (Pitchanart Sakakorn) embraces her new gig as if she were per- forming Shakespeare. With a method actor’s zeal, she pains- takingly researches and replicates her subjects’ manner of dress and speech, their body language and accent, even their precise words as they were variously stabbed to death or hanged (in one clever scene, she stops in mid-stabbing to double-check her lines from the script, “No, don’t!”). At first, Ting frets that, by playing the roles of the recently deceased, she risks angering their spirits, but as she becomes a minor ce- lebrity and helps put down a number of high-profile cases, those fears melt away: she comes to realize that the dead have a stake in her success, because they can be avenged through her. While tackling the case of the murder of former Miss Thailand
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