FILM SICK NURSES DIRECTOR PIRAPHAN LAOYONT, THODSAPOL SIRIWIWAT
Sick Nurses (2007)
‘Take a deep breath. This is going to hurt’
Sick Nurses (2007)
‘Take a deep breath. This is going to hurt’
Piraphan Laoyont and Thodsapol Siriwiwat’s Suay Laak Sai (English-language title ‘Sick Nurses’) follows the exploits of six nubile young things who have been selling off the body parts of their less well off (i.e., dead) patients on the black market. Several of the girls are besotted with a male doctor named Tar (Wichan Jaruhinda), including Nook (Chidjan Rujiphun) and her more innocent sister Tawan (Chon Wachananon). When it is revealed that Nook and Tar might already be lovers, Tawan threatens to expose the group’s scheme to the authorities and is summarily executed. The girls store her body safely until it can be sold, but as they begin to engage in their normal leisure activities the vengeful spirit of Tawan returns to avenge herself.
Jo (Dollaros Dachapratumwan), Yim (Ase Wang) and Nook (Chidjan Rujiphun) in Sick Nurses (2007)
Sick Nurses invites comparison with another Thai film, Monthon Arayangkoon’s The Victim (2006), a horror-thriller-mystery hybrid about the evils of cosmetic surgery, so-called ‘beauty’ doctors, and medical technologies. Both The Victim and Sick Nurses are noteworthy as crisis-film metaphors: the former trades on apparently conservative fears of female subjectivity, sexual identity and star consumption; while the latter envisions an industrialised Thailand wherein the promised democratic ideal of (feminine) beauty is sadistically twisted and homogenised by the rise of mass consumer cosmetic surgery. Unlike its predecessor, however, Sick Nurses is heavily uneven, combining marketable scenes of attractive young females enjoying themselves and each other with effects-driven set-pieces of transgressive body horror — content which, simultaneously gory and unbelievable, flips the movie’s tone on its head and alters the viewing experience irreparably. Anyone who’s seen the film will recall the most memorable sequences in which the binge-eating nurse and the two identical twins are forced to their deaths by the avenging ghost in ways that are disproportionately out of kilter with, and undercut, the melodrama that brings these young women together.
Insofar as it is a film about past injustices and the attempts of its female characters to make amends, Sick Nurses inevitably recalls Nakata Hideo’s 1998 classic Ringu — along with its sequel Ringu 2 (1999) and prequel Ringu O (2000), not to mention popular imitators like Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) and Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003), both written and directed by Takashi Shimizu — nonetheless, it sits well in the Thai horror tradition. The importance paid increasingly to indigenous traditions, local stars and local audiences by filmmakers and distributors challenges the simplification of Thai horror production as derivative — Nonzee Nimibutr’s Nang Nak (1999), for instance, is a powerful domestic benchmark, while Bin Bunluerit’s startling Krasue (2002) is the very antithesis of Nakata’s formally and iconographically conventional ghost story. It may be wickedly silly (there are long creeping tendrils of hair, it has girls falling in love all over the place, and the ending is positively scatological), but Sick Nurses at least updates the kaidan or ‘avenging spirit’ film by highlighting the changing role of women in Asian societies and by critiquing glamour culture in Thai media.
Insofar as it is a film about past injustices and the attempts of its female characters to make amends, Sick Nurses inevitably recalls Nakata Hideo’s 1998 classic Ringu — along with its sequel Ringu 2 (1999) and prequel Ringu O (2000), not to mention popular imitators like Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) and Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003), both written and directed by Takashi Shimizu — nonetheless, it sits well in the Thai horror tradition. The importance paid increasingly to indigenous traditions, local stars and local audiences by filmmakers and distributors challenges the simplification of Thai horror production as derivative — Nonzee Nimibutr’s Nang Nak (1999), for instance, is a powerful domestic benchmark, while Bin Bunluerit’s startling Krasue (2002) is the very antithesis of Nakata’s formally and iconographically conventional ghost story. It may be wickedly silly (there are long creeping tendrils of hair, it has girls falling in love all over the place, and the ending is positively scatological), but Sick Nurses at least updates the kaidan or ‘avenging spirit’ film by highlighting the changing role of women in Asian societies and by critiquing glamour culture in Thai media.
11 October, 2009
Ae (Kanya Rattapetch) in Sick Nurses (2007)
0 comments:
Post a Comment