In the Flesh: The Medium

Your daughter is locked in her room, the door sealed by sacred symbols painted onto squares of cloth. A shaman tells you not to let her out until he calls to say a ritual is done. It’s a setup as old as storytelling, from Orpheus looking back and dooming Eurydice to eternity in Hades to more recent examples like Red Asphalt and Signal 30, and it’s lost none of its punch. On the one hand is what your senses and impulses tell you, the world as you’ve always known it, and on the other is the warning of an authority figure. In Banjong Pisanthanakun and Na Hong-jin’s The Medium, this dynamic recurs again and again as the willfully ignorant and selfish Noi (Sirani Yankittikan) attempts to free her daughter Ming (Narilya Gulmongkolpech) from demonic possession. Again and again Noi encounters the warnings of people more knowledgeable and accomplished than herself, from her younger sister Nim (Sawanee Utoomma), a shaman, to the monks studying under the mystic Santi (Boonsong Nakphoo). No matter how many people get hurt or killed, Noi persists in doing whatever the moment compels her to do and letting others catch the consequences full in the face.

It’s her cowardly, reflexively defensive personality around which Pisanthanakun and Hong-jin’s film revolves, and it makes for a much more emotionally complicated core than most exorcism movies can boast. We see the cost of Noi’s avoidant selfishness repeatedly, culminating in the revelation that she sidestepped her responsibility to become a shaman of the local deity Ba Yan and contrived by trickery to force her sister Nim into taking her place. Utoomma’s sorrowful, earthy resting expression is perfectly suited to her role, a woman snatched out of her own life and flung into someone else’s without so much as being asked. Even Noi’s eventual apology is crass and opportunistic, more a plea for Nim to keep helping her and her daughter than a genuine expression of remorse. The mockumentary format at times veers a touch too close to rote, but the film’s commitment to involving and implicating the viewer through the proxy of the camera crew wins out in the end with some truly grisly thrills.

Perhaps the film’s greatest asset, though, is its meticulous beauty, a verite made to appear utterly effortless through brilliant location scouting and set dressing. Every room we enter is unique and conveys immediate information about its inhabitants. Every outdoor shot frames natural surroundings differently, focusing on different gradients of color from pale green to dark, rich brown and on into muted yellows, cinnabar, and cool, reserved orange. Pisanthanakun’s color grading is cool, but far from flattening the film’s palette he uses the extraordinary clarity of high-definition digital film to focus on the minutiae of color, inviting us to consider the different shades at work on a weathered door, or a monk’s well-worn robe. His vision of the sleepy Northern region of Isan is so gorgeously real and immersive that when things begin to tilt headlong toward hell and a gut-wrenching finale featuring what is perhaps film’s most horrible smile, you feel like it’s happening to you. If only you’d listened.