Fantasia Festival Report: Buppah Rahtree

Once again here is Mark Mann with his thoughts from Fantasia, this time on the horror-comedy Buppha Rahtree.

The Thai film Buppah Rahtree: Flower of the Night by director Yuthlert Sippapak is a fascinating film, and not just for its genre-bending blend of horror, drama, and comedy. The film certainly operates on many different levels, but perhaps the most intriguing aspect is the extent to which Sippapak uses the ghost-exorcism dimension of this film to underscore different facets of the East/West cultural divide. And it's pretty scary too.

Buppah Rahtree is initially cast as a sort of less-winsome Amelie character: a pretty girl with a poetic intelligence, acutely withdrawn from society, whose only hope of being drawn out of her bolted shell is the entrance of the right boy in her life. The difference is that her boy turns out to be very lame, so lame in fact that he gets her pregnant, coerces her into getting an abortion, and then skips town for England. Buppah is crushed, so she decides to off herself. These opening scenes do a meagre job of building the sense of dread, but it is at Buppah's suicide - around the 30-minute mark - that the film changes mood and pace completely and becomes interesting.

For most of middle part of the movie, Sippapak abandons the second-rate love story he's telling, and instead spends his time teasing out the various attitudes of a wonderful supporting cast of Bangkok locals to Buppah's ghost. The film becomes a tale of spiritual one-upmanship, as a series of shamans, priests, and monks (in escalating other-worldly power) try to get Buppah to leave the apartment. The references to William Friedkin's The Excorcist are extensive and obvious, especially when the Catholic priest comes to visit, but the devil here is just a lovelorn teen, and she has very grumpily possessed an entire apartment complex, not a little girl.

Most of the humour derives from the fear of Buppah on the part of her neighbours in the building, as well as the failures of the exorcists. It is in this regard that Buppah Rahtree is a ghost movie unlike any that are made in North America. Basically, no time is spent dwelling on the possibility that there might be a ghost, what if, oh god I think there is, etc. The response of the community is immediate and pragmatic. They gossip about the ghost, they bitch about it, they shout at it, and they go about trying to get rid of it as if they were getting rid of termites. Of course, they evince genuine fear, but for the most part it seems like they are just dealing with a particularly bad stroke of luck in getting this damn ghost in their building.

The horror aspect of this film is pretty blasé. Buppah's hauntings are fairly predictable: standing around in darkened hallways, suddenly appearing at your shoulder with a decomposed face, popping out of bathrooms, and so on. It's fun, but not that noteworthy. The drama of their misbegotten love is probably the least convincing part of the movie. The guy just seems ultimately pathetic, so I had a hard time getting behind her eternal love/hatred for him. Despite these weaknesses, the film is hugely entertaining, even if only for the Bangkok weirdos upon whom Buppah works out her ghostly frustrations.

Review by Mark Mann.