The Maid (2005)

The Maid (2005)

I once told a friend that I found it easier to believe in the possibility of ghosts than I did in the possibility of good ghost movies, to which he replied that I was the only gullible cynic he knew.

This exchange took place during that wretched hiatus between the release of Jan de Bont’s The Haunting and the American DVD release of the revelation that was Hideo Nakata’s Ringu four years later.

Since then, the Pacific Rim film cultures have given us some of the scariest, most challenging ghost movies of all time. In the west, ghost stories are just another subgenre under the heading “Horror.” In Asia, ghost stories are taken far more seriously.

Billed as Singapore’s first “home grown” horror movie, The Maid is an intriguing blend of ghost movie staples with superior acting and a fascinating background which will be unknown to most western viewers.

A pretty Filipina (Alessandra de Rossi) arrives in Singpore on the first day of the seventh month of the Chinese calendar, the Month of the Hungry Ghosts. She is warned by the couple in whose home she will work as a maid not to offend these spirits.

She watches Mrs. Teo (Huifang Hong) place food on the sidewalk in front of the Teo house to appease the ghosts’ appetite. She and her husband (Schucheng Chen) burn paper offerings and scold Rosa when she innocently tries to sweep away the ashes. It’s something you don’t do, like look a ghost in the face, stay out after 5:00 in the evening, or respond when someone calls your name from behind you.

The Teos work with a Chinese opera company, and when Rosa attends one of the performances she sits on the front row. Soon a pale, wizened man forces her to move as she is sitting in his wife’s seat. He’s a ghost and so, Rosa discovers, is everyone sitting on the front row with her. The seats are reserved for spirits.

These episodes are unnerving for Rosa, but her encounters with the Hungry Ghosts soon turn much nastier. She has befriended Ah Soon (Benny Soh), her master’s and mistress’ retarded, adult son. In a quartet of outstanding performances, Soh’s is chilling in a way you almost hate to admit. So brilliantly does he recreate the facial expressions, movements and mannerisms of a mentally challanged man, he makes you uncomfortable when you watch him. Rarely has that feeling of uneasy voyeurism you felt the first time you watched Freaks been generated so convincingly from the screen.

As she and Ah Soon play, Rosa notices that the unfortunate man insists on calling her Esther, the name of the Teo’s last maid, the one they tell her met a man a ran away. When? Oh, about this time last year.

But if Esther ran away, why does she keep turning up around the house?

Writer/director Kelvin Tong uses many of the standard tricks of the spookshow trade, but he uses them so well most of them seem new. If he borrows a little obviously from popular western films of recent years, I suspect he’s only finding his way.

And, to be honest, the film’s producer has admitted that he was aiming at making an “international” film, i.e., one that would appeal to a western audience. But western audiences don’t respond so favorably to the new Asian horror movies because they ape the American product. We like them for their different approaches to the material to which we’ve grown so bored from the overuse of cliches. In other words, we like best what’s most Asian in these films.

I think Tong is capable of some pretty eerie stuff in future, if he chooses to stick with horror for a few more movies.

The Maid isn’t the most frightening picture that’s come out of the east, nor is it the most original, but it promises much and uses its background well, introducing us to customs and beliefs we haven’t been exposed to before. That’s more than what we expect from a good horror movie—it’s what we should be able to expect from a good movie, period.

The Ghost of Mae Nak (2005)

The legend of Mae Nak’s ghost has served as the basis for films in Thailand over 20 times, and this ghost story seems to be as popular there as the one about the vanishing hitchhiker is in America. It's the story of young newlyweds who find the early days of their marriage disrupted by a vengeful spirit.

Mak (Siwat Chotchaicharin) loves Nak (Pataratida Pacharawirapong), and vice versa. They chant this refrain to each other frequently, but it doesn’t play as cutesy as it sounds like it would because they really seem to mean it. The film tends to play just a notch or two beyond the point of reality for western viewers—reactions are a little too big and some of the dialogue seems to be delivered too broadly, but this may be the norm in Thai cinema, as it is in Bollywood films.

We meet the two a week before their wedding. They’ve seen an ad in the newspaper for a house for sale and they meet with the real estate agent, Mr. Angel (Meesak Nakarat), who tells them the house is over 100 years old. The lovers like and trust Mr. Angel, but then they trust their lawyer, too. Obviously, folks in Bangkok are a little different than we are in this country.

As they inspect the house, Mak has a brief but frightening encounter with what is surely a ghost. Her appearance is preceded by the sound of a breathy sigh, like Joan Jett singing “Crimson and Clover.” Worse yet, Mak’s been having nightmares about this same vaporous woman. The waking sight of her unnerves him, but not to the point of disappointing Nak, who really wants to buy the place.

They buy it, fix it up, and move in.

After the wedding takes place, eerie visitations and frightening nightmares increase, but now Nak is experiencing them as well. She hears the name “Mae Nak” and mentions it to her grandmother. Granny tells her Mae Nak’s back story.

Around 100 years ago, a couple who loved each other very much married. Their names were Mak and Nak. Mak went away to war and was seriously wounded. Some monks nursed him back to health and he returned to his home. While he was gone, Nak (Porntip Papanai) gave birth to their child. They were happy together, but Mak couldn’t understand why his old friends avoided visiting with him at home.

I’ve probably already told you too much, so I’ll only say from this point on in the film writer/director Mark Duffield picks up the pace considerably as the ghost woman goes after everyone in the modern couple’s life who does anything to come between them. Duffield even tosses in a couple a gruesome death scenes that should bring a cold smile to the lips of even the most jaded western gorehounds.

There’s a nice scene in an operating room that is at once both surprising and silly, but it works because we’ve become used to the slightly overwrought feel of the entire film. I could do without the head-beating of having both sets of lovers bear the same names, but the film isn’t going for subtlety.

There are no overwhelming scares in the movie, but there is a building tension. If the first half of the picture intrigues with its moments of everyday life in an exotic setting, the second half ladles on a creepy disquiet that culminates in a kick ass ending you won’t see coming.

“The Ghost of Mae Nak” is a nifty ghost story that may burrow deepest under the skin of people who think that ghosts, and ghost stories, are silly. It asks, along with Poe, “Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?” and answers, “I’ll let you know when I wake up. If I wake up.”

Phone, aka Pon (2002)

This effective ghost story from South Korea approaches overkill but doesn’t go over the line. It also presents one of the best creep-out performances from a child, ever.  

Ji-won (Ji-won Ha) is a reporter who has just completed a series of articles about a ring of pedophiles. A man who is outraged by the stories (we assume because he’s close to, if not a member of, the ring) keeps bombarding her with threatening phone calls. Her best friend Ho-jeong (Yu-mi Kim) invites her to move temporarily into the new house Ho-j has just finished decorating and in which she and her husband Chang-hoon (Woo-jae Choi) will soon take up residence. Ji-w accepts, hoping to hide from her tormentor. 

But after the move, something odd happens. Ho-j’s young daughter Yeong-ju (Seo-woo Eun) answers a call on “Aunt Ji-won’s” mobile phone. Whatever she hears shapes her face into a mask of terror and she begins screaming.  After that, she fluctuates between happy little Yeong-ju and something else, something that develops a creepy, sexually charged affection for her father and bitter jealousy for her mother. Note here that the Yeong-ju can’t be more than six years old. 

As the air grows thicker and the story moves toward its grotesque finale, we learn that Ji-won’s mobile phone as been assigned a number that was given previously to a couple of people who died violently. There seems to be something in the number 6644. There are the ghost of the teen Jin-hie (Ji-yeon Choi), a girl who seeks vengeance because of a sordid, failed love affair; lots of rainy nights, and enough sudden apparitions to satisfy the most fervent lover of K-horror. The scene when Jin-hie succeeds in possessing Yeong-ju is terrifying not only within the context of the story but also because of the intensity of young Seo-woo Eun. You won’t believe what you’re seeing. 

The film was written and directed by Byeong-ki Ahn, and it is a masterful piece of work. If you’re not already familiar with the South Korean horror renaissance of the 1990s-early 2000s, this is a good place to start getting acquainted.

Dumplings (2004)

Wow. Just wow.

Set in contemporary Hong Kong, Dumplings is the story of Mrs. Li, a former TV star who is married to a man 15 years her senior. She’s 35 and he lost interest long ago in favor of his 20-something secretary/bimbo.

To regain her youth, Mrs. Li begins a regimen of eating dumplings — bite-sized, meat-filled, dough-covered — cooked by Aunt Mei, who appears to be in her early 30s. The dumplings are reputed to restore one’s youth, vigor and sexual attractiveness. Mrs. Li is at first repulsed by the lumps of dumps floating in broth, and we become so as well as hints begin to drop as to just what the meat in the concoction is. Aunt Mei — who, we discover, was 20 in 1960 — is a former nurse with a straight line to mainland China, where abortions are still performed in the thousands.

Written by Pik Wah Li (under the name Lillian Lee), who wrote the novel on which Farewell My Concubine was based, and directed by Fruit Chan, the film is — on the surface — about a power struggle between two women. Under the surface, it’s a biting revelation of how the rich, beautiful and powerful use the poor, pitiful and helpless. As Marie Antoinette said, “Let ‘em eat jiaozi.”

This one is as disturbing as any movie you’re likely to see unless you go so far underground even I won’t follow you.

Sick Nurses (2007)

If you’re like me, and are willing to admit it, the title of this flick alone will land it in your Netflix queue. Then there’s the poster, depicting a pair of sexy, blood-spattered nurses. To hell with the queue — this one’s for instant streaming.

Sick Nurses is a horror film from Thailand and if the action took place in the real world, it would make very little sense. We’re in a hospital that seems to house no patients — just a half-dozen hot young nurses and one doctor who make a living harvesting and selling body parts. When one of the nurses who thinks the doctor is hers exclusively finds out that he is going to marry her pregnant sister, she cracks up and threatens to reveal their illegal operation. The other nurses kill her and, on the seventh day after her death, she returns to enact her revenge on everyone.

At this point, this goofy little film gets a bit more serious as directors Piraphan Laoyont and Thodsapol Siriwiwat go all surreal with the visuals. The hospital’s empty halls stop looking like ways to keep the budget down and start looking like corridors of the mind where bad things, and only bad things, ooze out of the walls or float along the ceiling.

But the quasi-artsy imagery never completely overcomes the over-the-top quality. What began as a camp comedy becomes a camp black comedy with lots of gore, long streaming hair and garter belts.