You always need to lower your guard and embrace a dose of silliness to enjoy a Thai horror-comedy, sometimes neither a horror nor a comedy. Buppha Arigato, the new film in the Buppha series of movies that were hits in the early 2000s, requires you to not just lower your guard, but to discard it altogether and embrace the mess, the wackiness and mostly the misfired jokes. Some will enjoy the film's rare moments of hilarity, and I sincerely congratulate you. Otherwise, the old Buppha cine-legend has melted out spectacularly in the Japanese snow.
Set in Japan why? Because then the film can reproduce the image of powder-faced Japanese ghouls for the 1,000th time. Buppha Arigato feels haphazard and just plain bad. It strains to carry on the Buppha lore -- in the earlier films, she is a vengeful spirit of a wronged woman who seeks revenge against men and perhaps the patriarchal society. But any feminist reading would be a sham now that the film is so flimsy, so content with making one joke after another, in scenes that feel half-cooked. In the early-2000s Buppha Ratree films, Buppha, played by Chermal Boonyasak, is a fully realised character, an angry woman (or a ghost) with a clearly defined personality. Now played by Supassra Thanachat, she's a phantom, purposeless, lost, beautiful and simply uninteresting.
Writer/director Yuthlert Sippapak at times shows that he's skilful enough to keep things moving, to set up a scene that builds tension, though at the end it feels like he has tricked us into joining this painful ride on the snowy Japanese backroads.
Basically, this is a haunted-house story. A group of young men arrive at the Japanese countryside, in the middle of a white winter, to shoot a music video. But the house they've rented is haunted by at least two ghosts, or maybe three, or four, or 10 -- I don't know. The main ghosts are a white-faced mother and child, while there's also a mysterious Thai woman, our Buppha, who floats around in a mix of sadness and yearning, neither alive nor dead, and soon we wonder: Why should we care?
The tradition of Asian female ghosts and their posthumous girl empowerment, their banshee feminism, is a subject of so many academic papers. The old Buppha films show a glimpse of that, though in a confusing way that sometimes shifts between empowering and exploitative.
The new film is flat, incompetent and devoid of any undercurrent; in fact it reinforces the stereotype of waif-like women pining endlessly for a lost love. Buppha used to be scary and sorrowful; now she's become a meaningless object, a showpiece that inspires only indifference.
Buppha Arigato
Starring Supassra Thanachat, Charlie Potjes.
Directed by Yuthlert Sippapak.
In Thai with English subtitles.
