Fridae

If I didn’t know better, I’d say that the director of 9 Temples must be a great fan of The Amazing Race. Consider: to ward off a karmic curse that will surely end in a deadly fate, a sceptical Thai man and his girlfriend must make a pilgrimage to visit 9 temples during the weekend. You will cheer them on as they brave through mundane challenges like bad driving conditions, vehicle breakdowns, badly chosen detours, or having their relationship fray at the edges during the tensions of the trip while taking on a strange monk as their freeloading passenger. Then of course, there are the increasingly vivid and horrifying hallucinations that seem to point towards the existence of ghosts or a karmic curse. Maybe this is The Amazing Race – Thai horror edition!

I’m surprised that director Saranyoo Jiralak didn’t play this for laughs, but he is after all the assistant director of the Thai New Wave auteur, Wisit Sasanatieng (Citizen Dog, Tears of the Black Tiger), and capable of far better than a run-of-the-mill horror flick. It turns out that this isn’t strictly speaking a horror movie at all – the scares are quite tame for Thai horror standards. Instead, the director plays the film as a road trip movie with mild supernatural elements.

The script concentrates on the core point of the travelogue genre – that the outward, material journey where one meets goes to strange places and meets strangers is really an internal voyage that ends with the discovery and acceptance of the self.

Saranyoo Jiralak’s debut effort at directing is a well-chosen project with a strong script, and he nevertheless reminds us of his pedigree as Wisit’s assistant. We are treated to beautiful cinematography of Thailand’s countryside and advertising campaign quality shots of the cross country journey that is punctuated by a well-executed electronica soundtrack created by DJ Montonn Jira and a few other local bands.