Zee-Oui is a true story, brought to the screen and TV many times, of a Chinese immigrant who was a serial killer of children in Thailand in the late 1940s. The film opens in a style that is unabashedly horror: we see a bloody heart which is used to make a sort of broth. Zee-Oui (a Thai corruption of the Chinese name Li Hui) abducts children and murders them in order to use their organs to make a potion which gives him temporary relief from tuberculosis, a disease he has suffered from since childhood.
The scenes of the murder of children are absolutely horrific, not so much for the gore but for the cunning creation of suspense. However, once the film starts to explore the life of the assassin, played with great sensitivity by the Chinese actor Duan Long, we see that Zee-Oui rather that being strictly a horror film, occupies the middle ground between horror and melodrama - two genres which have never been estranged from each other.
It is the genre of melodrama which traces the descent into hell of individuals who are "humiliated and offended." Harassed by both Thais and his compatriots, this disorientated and sick man exists in a desperate state of anguish. His mind is racked by his experience of the war, when he was forced by an officer to eat human flesh, and racked still more profoundly by his mother’s treatments, which we get to know through a series of flashbacks. The scenes with his mother in China emerge as pivotal in the construction of this horror-melodrama - simple scenes, but of touching intensity (thanks also to the merits of actress Zhang Shaohau). When the assassin roams a glittering amusement park coughing, like a creature from the dark and looking for children to abduct, he is a terrifying and pathetic figure who elicits both horror and compassion, not unlike James Whale’s Frankenstein.
In this film with its ingenious narrative structure the two director-sisters show an elegant, "international" style. Tanissapong Sasinmanop, author of the beautiful and dramatic cinematography and excellent editing, well above Thai cinema standards, gives a valuable contribution. Zee-Oui is a memorable film, and not merely for its powerful imagery. Among the many attempts at a similar project which descend into mere rhetoric, this is one of the few films which has managed to significantly convey the inextricable mixture of cruelty and insanity, pain and fragility - the tenderness of the monster.