Dearest Sister (Nong Hak)

 Dearest Sister is the film Mattie Do did before one of this year's best surprises, The Long Walk. It's another great movie.

 Like The Long Walk it's a weird genre mishmash that straddles drama, supernatural horror and psychological thrillers (no science fiction this time, though) while mining a rich thematic vein. It also plays with its audience's sympathy and expectations with abandon; this is a highly unpredictable movie, more so than Long Walk. Oh, and it's beautifully shot and acted as well, featuring a few faces that would return for the later movie.

 The film follows Nok (Amphaiphun Phommapunya,) a village girl who's been hired by a distant relative she's never seen to go to the big city and be her live-in caretaker. Everything immediately seems hostile to her: She spends a whole day at the bus station she arrives at, seemingly forgotten, and is picked up by a foreigner who barely speaks at her, instead shouting at his phone in a foreign language.

 When they arrive at the house the help treats her with disdain, and her relative does not come out to meet her; Her new home doesn't seem to be very welcoming.

 When Ana, her relative (Vilouna Phetmany) does deign to meet her on the next day, she seems aloof, chilly, resentful of having to be sat upon by a stranger. The shouty foreigner turns out to be her husband Jakob (Tambet Tuisk,) and all this was apparently his idea; Ana is losing her sight and seems to be a victim or random accidents and injuries, so she really needs the help.

 There is a lot of baggage to figure out in the early going. Everybody seems to resent each other and victimize poor, vulnerable, sweet Nok. It almost feels like a triumph, or at least justified, when instead of sending her salary back to her family at the village she goes out and buys a few things for herself; now surrounded by opulence, it's easy to see how she would be tempted into thinking of herself, right?

 But even when things get a little better and Ana starts warming up to Nok and opening up to her, Nok keeps behaving like a twerp. Little things at first: minor secrets and betrayals that she rationalizes as standing up for herself or a revenge against being exploited. There's something innocent about how pettily selfish she is, but it gets harder and harder to condone as the film goes by.

 Especially once Ana reveals her secret: as her sight deteriorates, ghosts come to her and whisper things to her. She doesn't remember the messages, but she mutters them out loud while the apparitions seize her. Numbers. As Nok quickly realizes and capitalizes upon, winning lottery numbers. It's the ghosts, who sometimes turn violent, who cause Ana's mysterious wounds.
 (The whole numbers deal seems a bit random, but I remember while growing up in Argentina there was a lot of advice on how to choose winning numbers, some of it verging on the supernatural. Most corner stores used to have posters with different types of dreams, for example, and the numbers that were associated with them.)

 So this is a movie about (mostly) horrible people doing horrible things to each other, in a sort of Karmic shitstain contest: Nok keeps showing her colors as the film goes on. Ana is more of a victim - she's a bit of an asshole, but to be honest events end up justifying her attitude. Her husband has got a lot of dodgy shit going on. The housekeeper and her husband end up putting in a respectable showing, too.
 There's a very pulpy pleasure in seeing where the story goes next - how things will escalate, how low any given character will stoop.
 But there's also a powerful message tangled up in this ugly mess: everyone is judging everyone else, everyone feels they are being victimized, everyone interprets everything that happens in the worst possible light to remain angry, and use that outrage to justify their increasingly selfish actions. Even minor characters are taking advantage of others (and feel aggrieved when called out on it.) Inequality is a bitch.
 This is abstracted to the whole social situation; it's hard to miss the point when an Australian tourist acts as if he owns Nok just because he bought her a drink, especially when everyone in the movie has been treating her as a whore simply because she went to work to a house owned by a foreigner ("Off to find a white husband?") In fact, the only unambiguously good character in the movie is a different foreigner who appears soon afterwards and refuses to take advantage of the situation after rescuing Nok from the predicament she had unwittingly(?) gotten herself into, and even he paternalistically treats Nok like a country bumpkin.

 Dearest Sister is smart, bleak, insightful, powerful, and a damn entertaining movie to boot. It's not particularly scary, but that's almost besides the point. Two out of two for team Mattie Do/Christopher Larsen, now to track down Chanthaly...