Fridae

What makes Thai film such a joy to watch for me is that there’s a palpable sense of a national cinema, an obvious and unique take on genres and issues that looks and feels entirely different from Hollywood offerings that one might not feel from say a Singaporean director deliberately making a film that would appeal to an ‘international audience’.

Take for example Laddaland, the latest Thai horror to hit screens here. The film is technically a haunted house flick but here’s the real twist: This film is what you’d get if a Thai director translated a Hollywood suburban angst melodrama into the horror genre instead.

The set-up is the same as any horror film – a family moves into middle class suburbia with intentions of settling their roots in respectable, if not high society. But clearly there is something rotten in this exclusive gated community with its Stepford Ken and Barbie couples. It’s not so much the scare-a-minute ghouls and creepy spirits of the departed haunting the house at the corner as much as the fact that our Everyman just brought his family into a debt trap, settling in a house his children will end up paying the mortgage decades later, living the consumerist 0% instalment lifestyle in a gated community where all the neighbours are similarly trapped and far more angsty because they’ve been trying to keep up this lifestyle for a longer time.

Laddaland is at its best when it fashions the middle class nightmare in the context of a horror movie. While the scares may be too predictable, relying on all-too-familiar jump cuts and sudden loud noises, it is the social allegory that makes the horror and dread work on a deeper, unexpected level.