Wisit Sasanatieng called his moviemaking career to a halt after the flop of his fourth feature
, 1970). Some international assistance was handed to him for the development of martial arts drama
the life of a boxer in Thailand. But nothing came of it.
Now, after a five-year absence, Wisit Sasanatieng has unexpectedly returned to filmmaking with a new studio and an innovative, spooky new style of horror in his fifth film,
Senior (
Run-phee, 2015).
Based on his own first novel,
Senior features two protagonists of different sex and different states of mortality: a young high-school orphan, Mon, who can smell dead people, and a ghost called Senior who can be seen only by people who are about to die.
He wants her to help him investigate past events at his former school, now converted into a convent. Rejecting him at first, she finally agrees after confronting many strange incidents there. Murder, betrayal and death have haunted this place for more than five decades, involving a princess, a secretary, a gardener, a nurse and a mysterious boy.
Sasanatieng’s hilarious fifth feature features a heap of discoveries, twists and japes. Instead of one or two ghosts, we get a whole team of them – albeit that they return with the same old call for justice and revenge as in many other Thai horror films.
This is explicitly in contrast to the American-style hordes of zombies who are usually the product of scientific or wartime mistakes. Ghosts appear everywhere – in a room, a library, a house, etc. Numerous kinds of ghosts emerge, and not simply the old traditional ones; here we meet a wall ghost and even a popcorn ghost! Ghosts are no longer detectable to people in terms of visibility or invisibility, but through sneezes and smells.
And that is not all. Ghosts also fight each other, through the exercise of superpowers rather than muscles. But unlike in other films, their power is limited by the borders and spaces of their old world. In fact, ghosts are no more threatening than people. In the end, humans may be worse than ghosts.
The story is embroidered with numerous mysteries and twists. Like Andy Warhol, Sasanatieng shows his skill in blending both high and low culture, combining aspects of Western and Thai imagination, Italian-style locations, French classrooms, and German fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel.
But the ghosts are in the typical Thai-style – the dead returning for justice. Despite too many twists and overlong details, the film still shows Sasanatieng to be a master of shaping artistic popular cinema.
The excess of twists can be forgiven due to the sweet romance between the two protagonists, Mon and Senior. Indeed, for this writer Senior is the best Thai film of this year.