Meen (Apasiri Nitibhon), Ting becomes possessed by the beauty queen’s spirit, who vio- lently disagrees with the direction of the investigation. Through Ting, Meen tries to alert the po- lice that they have the wrong sus- pect, but the detectives involved don’t listen. There’s nothing more for it than for Ting/Meen to go sleuthing alone—and the briskly paced thriller barrels hap- pily towards a climax, at only the halfway mark.
It is at this point that the as- tute viewer must be checking the clock and wondering if the stated running time of the film was way off. Writer-director Monthon Arayangkoon takes this opportu- nity to make a sudden, abrupt break, deftly changing the entire tone and premise of the film in a single gesture. The second half of the movie recapitulates what has come before from the point of view of a film crew making the movie you have been watching, a sensationalized adaptation of “real events.” The filmmakers in the movie acknowledge that some details of the plot and char- acterization have been adapted for dramatic purposes, but find themselves trapped in a recursive situation where, in the course of making a ghost story, they are haunted for real. If you were not already impressed with star Pitchinart Sakakorn, it is here that her performance really starts to shine: playing an actress named May who is playing an actress named Ting who is playing the role of the murdered Meen, and while trying to show that Ting is haunted by Meen, May struggles with the fact she is herself haunted. This is a J-Horror fugue, an M.C. Escher print with ghosts.
The filmmakers within the story marvel at how their reality has started to tangle with fiction, and joke at one point that they
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can save money on CGI effects now that real ghosts are show- ing up in their footage. For stu- dents of the J-Horror genre, this aside packs a special punch—the makers of the Japanese Ringu cycle tried to publicize their films with various rumors and urban legends that their films had ac- tually, inadvertently, recorded images of genuine ghosts. Entire websites were concocted to track such instances of spectral imag- ery, and the makers of rival J- Horror entries sometimes made similar claims. THE VICTIM kicks off as an unusually fast-paced long-haired ghost flick that plays with all the familiar icons of the genre, but in a distinctive and fresh way. By the time it reaches its end, the already impressive film has gone from strength to strength to fin- ish up as a head-spinning exer- cise in meta-moviemaking. You half expect to see your own name in the credits, listed as “viewer.” Tartan Video’s DVD looks
fabulous, but has some of the poorest subtitles of their line. The dialogue is translated into clumsy, grammatically awkward and sometimes misspelled En- glish, and important moments of Thai language writing (newspa- pers, signs) go untranslated altogether.
HD/Blu-ray BLACK NARCISSUS
1947, ITV DVD, DD-2.0/ST/+, £19.99, 100m 8s, BR DVD-0 By Rebecca and Sam Umland
We reviewed the Criterion DVD of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s distin- guished BLACK NARCISSUS back in VW 75:55, in which we presumptuously declared that Criterion’s disc contained “as
definitive a presentation of the film as one is ever likely to have.” We were quite wrong, of course, because the presentation on the Criterion disc frankly can- not compete with the brilliant HD image quality on ITV’s Blu-ray disc, which is stunning. Sharing a number of features with the horror film, BLACK NARCISSUS is about the powerful effects of alien scenery and elevation on five Anglican nuns who travel to Mopu, a remote location located high in the Himalayas. At Mopu Palace—known to the locals as the “House of Women” because it was used as a harem by an old potentate—the Sisters intend to set up a chapel, school and hos- pital for the local inhabitants. Sis- ter Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), is named the Sister Superior of St. Faith (as the former whorehouse is re-named); with her she takes four colleagues: Sister Briony (Judith Furse), Sister Philippa (Flora Robson), Sister Honey (Jenny Laird) and the mentally unstable Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron, who would later appear in Hammer’s 1971 TWINS OF EVIL). At Mopu Palace they meet Angu Ayah (May Hallet), the eccentric, slightly mad care- taker of the Palace who longs for the days when the Palace was a harem. They also meet Mr. Dean (David Farrar), the cyni- cal British agent to the Old Gen- eral (Esmond Knight, who later played the film director in Michael Powell’s PEEPING TOM). Mr. Dean (rightly) predicts that the nuns will fail in their mission at St. Faith, and indeed, soon after their arrival, repressed memories and desires—aspects of their pre- vious lives—begin to emerge, the unfamiliar, dream-like location of Mopu apparently responsible. We learn, for instance, that Sister Clodagh took her vows in order to forget a failed romance back home in Ireland. Although
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