A Médium

Thailand's official submission to 2022's Oscars is the creepiest exorcism movie I have ever seen. It's so scary, brutal, captivating and provocative. It grabs your attention and keeps you on the edge of your seats from the very beginning until the credits start rolling. It's the year's best horror film so far.

This was suprisingly good until the characters got completely stupid. There was some great creativity in the plot, but like so many movies, the writers relied on utter stupidity from the characters to drive the plot and situations forward. Some great scenes in this film though. Very hardcore in some aspects.

Saw this at the cinema last night, and while I found it to be good-looking and well-made, with an interesting setting, it was still nothing new or special. I've seen everything in this film before. Nowhere near on the same level as The Wailing, which this shares many elements with.

The screaming and running around and people acting possessed in the last act becomes tedious after a while, as there's barely any emotional involvement with the characters. I simply did not care about any of the characters who made it to the last act.

Not often I'd say this about a horror film, but this would have been improved by actually being subtler, and leaving out some of the mayhem. And an edit - this is much too long at 130mins.

Thai-Korean supernatural horror, Banjong Pisanthanakun's 'The Medium,' burns slowly but intensely throughout. It has all the elements of Asian horror unique to the Korean and Thai genres, such as creepy music and a darkly saturated filter. The film loses steam at times owing to flaws in its mockumentary style, but Pisanthanakun succeeds far more when he concentrates on the complexities of the familial links and what some of the key reveals imply for each character.

In the first leg it has a lot going for it. The cinematography is great, and as much as they attempt to make things dreary, this thing could really function as travel vlog for Thailand. The faux doc style brings a realism to the mystic elements and it feels like a unique backdrop for a horror flick. The setup is slow but enjoyable and you begin to wonder if it's ever going to erupt into full blown horror. Rest assured, it does. However, with the quality of the preamble, you grow to believe the film had something more clever up it's sleeve. What you eventually get is a rather run of the mill possession tale, and things sort of fall apart from there.

Where the mocumentary initially lent credibility, it eventually devolves into the common found footage problem of "why would a real cameraman actually be filming this?" At one point reaching the height of ridiculousness where a girl has a mishap with her period and the camera follows her to the bathroom, like a psychopath. The possession element does little to set itself apart from it's many contemporaries, aside from forgoing the regular Christian/Satan angle. Narilya Gulmongkolpech's performance is enthusiastic but is often reminiscent of haunted house staff doing the crazy/scary routine. The whole thing seems to overstay it's welcome a bit, which is strange because the slow build seems to breeze by and it's only when things heat up that they start to feel redundant.

I don't want to be too hard on it, because it's in many ways a well made picture, it just doesn't live up to it's own potential.