Chanthaly

 There aren't that many movies from Laos - 40, according to IMDB, maybe half of them released after Chanthaly. It's a very traditional, still staunchly communist country, with that regime's mistrust of anything fantastic. So Mattie Do's and spouse Christopher Larsen's achievement of making three horror movies over the last decade or so is impressive on multiple levels - not the least of which is that they all kick major ass.

 This was their first feature, after only a little experience in Laotian TV, and it shows. Made wholly in the couple's house at the same time they lived in it (the film took about a year to complete), it's a little bit rougher, a little bit less assured, but it's recognizably of a piece with Dear Sister and The Long Road, which was one of the best movies I saw last year.

 Chanthaly (Amphaiphun Phommapunya) lives with her father in a walled-off house in Vientiane; for all her adult life, she's been taking in the world outside in small snippets when the car gate opens, zealously guarded by her dad (Douangmany Soliphanh, who co-wrote). She has a heart disease, the same one her father insists killed her mother at childbirth. Which is strange, because she carries with her some vague memories of her mom, including a particularly upsetting one where she watched her die.

 And then she starts seeing her at night.

 

 The first two acts of the movie revolve around Chan's attempts to discover the truth about her mother, and to try to determine if she's actually seeing her mother's ghost, or if she's hallucinating due to the drugs she's taking to keep her condition in check.
 That plot's a very slow burn, interweaved with more mundane dramatic concerns - a possible suitor (Soulasath Souvanavong), a childhood friend (Soukchinda Duangkhamchan) who obviously carries a torch for her, and her clashes with her dad as she rebels against his rule. It's very well written but a little bit staid, a very traditional gothic yarn... until a twist contorts the movie's third act into a completely different beast.

 That it's a first movie comes across in the certain clumsiness to how some of the early scenes are structured - the pacing seems a bit off, but either it quickly gets better or I got into sync with its rhythms, because I stopped noticing after fifteen minutes. The sound design is a much bigger problem, with the thrum of machinery or night sounds way too high in the mix on most scenes.

 It's not really scary, at least not to these jaded eyes, but the horror elements are very well handled; no visual or practical effects to speak of, just clever framing, editing and blocking. The film just looks good in general, with careful compositions and good use of different color schemes; Not bad for someone whose formal training was being given a book on directing by her husband and watching other people do it while working as a makeup artist. The actors are great, too, particularly Phommapunya, whom Do met while on the makeup department of a TV show.

 Fun fact: The movie was effectively made open source as a stretch goal towards funding their next movie. You can watch it on youtube or download it from the Internet Archive; there was even a contest to remix all the footage (used and unused) to tell a different story.

 It's a really good movie, is what I'm saying. I have no idea if these films are so enthrallingly weird because of their maker's sensibilities, all the tiptoeing around political strictures, or the incorporation of local customs and superstitions. Likely to be some mix of all three, I guess. We're lucky they seem to have managed to gather an immense pool of talent around them; Can't wait to see what they come up with next.

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...

The Long Walk (Bor Mi Vanh Chark)

 The Laos countryside fifty years in the future looks very much like the Laos countryside a hundred years in the past. A little future-tech intrudes into this impoverished pastoral every now and then - people have displays running on their arms, or pay for stuff by holding their wrists up to scanners - but other than that, their houses are still rickety wood and wicker structures that might as well be from three (or thirteen) centuries earlier. They still struggle to eke out a living from subsistence farming, and they sell their produce on a wooden stand on the roadside the same way their ancestors have going many generations back. A shrewd, very real observation in a movie full of shrewd, very well observed moments.

 The Long Walk does have some science fiction elements, but they're used as a backdrop to a puzzle of a  ghost story that straddles the line between drama and horror; It's one of those quiet, unobtrusive movie that lets you figure out what's going on in your own time.

 An old man (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy) lives on a small house on the outskirts of a village, making a meager living of selling bits and pieces of technology he scavenges on the countryside. He's also able to see ghosts, one of which (Noutnapha Soydara) has accompanied him on the (long) walk between his house to the village since he was a little kid.

 Saying more would edge into spoiler territory, as much of the joy in this film comes from putting all the pieces of the puzzle together yourself. Answers come slowly (ghosts don't talk, and the old man is pretty laconic), and once assembled they resolve into an intricate, affecting character study that's spliced with a neat, thematically appropriate time travel story.

 Besides the ghosts you get a bit more blood than you'd expect for a movie this quiet, but it doesn't ever really go for scares - just a pervading sense of creepiness. It's gorgeously shot with a lot of sun-drenched, verdant scenery and carefully chosen colour palettes.

 It's really hard to make a compelling film out of a script that holds back so much information for so long, so major props to married couple Christopher Larsen (script) and Mattie Do (direction) for pulling it off so beautifully.

 The acting is great, too; The Old Man oozes grief and resentment, making all the horrible decisions he makes a little more poignant and understandable, Ghost Girl does so much just with her eyes, and little kid is heartbreaking at points. (None of the characters are ever given proper names.)

 I do have a problem with some of the film's logic, and one of the plot developments doesn't make sense, but guess it wouldn't be a proper time travel movie without at least one major plot hole.

 Saying that this is the best Laotian movie I've ever seen wouldn't mean much, since I think it might be the only Laotian movie I've ever seen, but let me put it this way: it's easily in my top ten films of the last decade.