Dorm, directed by the guy who made the Thai hits
My Girl and
My Elephant and won the Glass Bear Award at last year's Berlin International Film Festival, is one of the most marrow-twistingly scary movies you'll ever see. But not because of the hauntings it depicts.
Dorm captures, brilliantly, the fears of being a kid. Being separated from home and friends. Dealing with new places. Dealing with not being a little kid any more, but not yet being a young adult. Trying to figure out adults and parents in particular. Learning about death. Director Sugmakanan, along with his brilliant cinematographer, Niramon Ross (who shot the original
Shutter), makes the most mundane things seem overwhelming, from a bunch of towel racks to rows of uncomfortable-looking institutional beds. Creepy music accompanies the boring daily grind, adding a sense of menace to
Dorm, so that everyday things become as ominous as a shower curtain with the silhouette of Norman Bates' mom looming behind it.
All this makes the reality of the little kids in Dorm seem fragile, or worn out, to the point that the broken reality of ghosts can just waltz in to the everyday and displace normalcy. At the same time, Dorm manages to make the ghosts seem normal within the whacked reality it presents.
Dorm is not just a great ghost movie for adults, but a great, if scary, movie for kids, because it doesn't condescend. This movie has incredible heart. Take
Dorm out of modern Thailand and set it in 1930s Waukegan, and you'll swear this is a lost Bradbury story from the pages of an issue of
Unknown that never made it to press. Even if you yanked the ghost elements out of
Dorm, you'd still have a great coming-of-age movie on your hands, about a kid coming to grips with a new school as he deals with a changing family dynamic at home.
The kids are all great actors. But a special shout out has to go to Chintara Sukapatana as the headmistress Miss Pranee. She's scary, as all headmistresses should be. But her performance is incredibly layered, so much so that with a tilt of her head she can give careful viewers a hint as to what the true nature of the movie's ghosts are.
In an era when the tropes of the Asian ghost movie have become as clichéd and predictable as the tropes of the North American slasher movie of the early 1980s, it's a real joy to see an entry that retains the aesthetic that first made the Asian ghost movie so appealing while at the same time breaking new ground.
One flaw: At the beginning of the movie, Ton gets a buzz cut, but thereafter his hair varies in length from scene to scene. This is not a clever way to show the passage of time, but a good old-fashioned continuity gaffe. There's also the obligatory terrible ballad during a happy montage, b
