Tag: Aticha Pongsilpipat

Creepy Crawly (๑๐๐ ร้อยขา, Pakphum Wongjinda & Chalit Krileadmongkon, 2022)

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While everyone’s busy thinking about a high profile threat of infection, an unexpected aggressor raises its ugly head in Pakphum Wongjinda and Chalit Krileadmongkon’s insectile horror Creepy Crawly (๑๐๐ ร้อยขา). Centipedes in themselves are little creepy given the undulating motion of their many legs and tendency to crawl out from places where you’d least expect them, but this particular bug seems to have undergone a mammoth evolution to become a bloodsucking parasite capable of threatening the human race!

The film opens with a naive vlogger getting lost in the Thai countryside and deciding to pitch a tent in the middle of nowhere while unable to locate her campsite despite having encountered an elderly person bleeding profusely from the mouth whom she does nothing to help. During the night she’s bothered by giant centipedes and then has some kind of altercation with the elderly person. Some months later, an emergency order has been placed on the country due to the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic. Another YouTuber, Fame, who is well known for uploading videos criticising hotel accommodation, arrives at a hotel which has been turned into a quarantine facility along with her brother, Fiew, and a family of three, adult Taekwondo champion Leo, his naive sister Lena, and their father who is deaf. 

Obviously, the centipede, which is later described as a Tablongplum which can possess a human body and feast on its blood, has somehow made its way to the hotel and is particularly interested in Fame because she suffers from a rare disease which means that her blood would enable the Tablongplum to live a very long life. However, the bugs aren’t the only threat in the hotel even if they’re first discovered by the only remaining maid, Pond, feasting on a dead rat in a vacant room. The sleazy manager, Wit, is paranoid about the fortunes of his hotel during the pandemic considering it has already been dealt a reputational blow after being identified as the source of a covid cluster. It’s implied that he’s only got permission to re-open as a quarantine facility thanks to a dodgy deal with an important person who has also turned up, ironically belittling Wit for wearing a mask while describing covid as a “just a cold”, for a completely free and very discreet overnight stay with his mistress. 

Those are just a few of the reasons that Wit refuses to listen when Fame and Leo discover a body at the end of a blood trail, accusing them of being in cahoots doing a bit for the YouTube channel to further discredit his hotel which even on the surface of things seems not to be particularly well run. With the hotel technically in lockdown and patrolled by an armed guard, the tension begins to increase once it’s realised that the Tablongplum can possess and take on the form of any of the guests meaning no one can trusted and the bug could be anywhere. Somewhat improbably, not only is it able to fully understand human language even independent of its human hosts but also seems to have some knowledge of culture and is aware of how various things work rather than just being a giant blood sucking parasite apparently able to control vast armies of much smaller but admittedly nasty bugs especially when they appear in large numbers. 

The solution seems to be “kill it with fire”, though just the pandemic the bugs prove hard to stamp out with the infection seemingly continuing even after the big bad is supposedly eliminated as the centipedes continue to dominate human society. The film seems to be making a minor point about silly YouTubers who endanger themselves or thoughtlessly ruin the lives of others for clicks while also laying the blame on sleazy managers like Wit along with the political corruption that enables a health hazard to continue long after it should. Meanwhile, tiny bugs eat away at the surface, undermining the foundations as they go. Seeing an entire hotel covered in horrible insects is undoubtedly creepy though perhaps there was something rotten there all along. In any case, it seems there’s no escape from nature’s revenge or its bloodsucking tendrils. 

Creepy Crawly is released in the US on Digital, blu-ray, and DVD on Oct. 3 courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Love of Siam (รักแห่งสยาม, Chookiat Sakveerakul, 2007)

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Two young men contending with grief and familial dislocation begin to wonder if it’s possible to love someone knowing that you’ll lose them, or conversely if it’s possible to live without love in Chookiat Sakveerakul’s melancholy drama Love of Siam (รักแห่งสยาม, Rak haeng Siam). The title may sound overly patriotic but in actuality refers to the Siam Square shopping area when the boys meet again as teenagers after many years apart and rekindle their friendship only to be confused by their growing feelings for each other while each struggling with contradictory demands from fracturing family and romantic drama to the responsibilities of friendship and career. 

When they first meet as small boys, Mew (Arthit Niyomkul), who has come to live with his elderly grandmother, and Tong (Jirayu La-ongmanee) live opposite each other in a small Bangkok back street. When Mew is hassled in the school toilets, Tong comes to his rescue and gains a black eye in the process, cementing the boys’ friendship. Everything begins to change, however, when Tong goes on holiday with his family to Chiang Mai. His older sister Tang (Laila Boonyasak) stays on to hang out with friends and later disappears during a hiking trip leaving the family devastated. To escape their grief they decide to move away, breaking the friendship between the two boys. A decade or so later, they re-encounter each other by chance in Siam Square where Tong (Mario Maurer) is trying to buy a CD of rising boyband August of which Mew (Witwisit Hiranyawongkul) just happens to be the lead singer. 

In the intervening years, Tong has become somewhat distant and is now in an unsatisfying relationship with one of the school’s most popular girls, Donut (Aticha Pongsilpipat). As we discover, his father has developed an alcohol problem unable to overcome his guilt and grief over what happened to Tang, while his mother attempts to power through by exerting control over every aspect of her life. In a shocking coincidence, Mew’s band manager June (Laila Boonyasak) happens to look exactly like Tang, Tong and his mother eventually asking her to play the part of the absent sibling in the hope of curing his father’s depression. 

As much as the film revolves around the love story between the boys as they begin to figure out their sexuality, at the end it’s a story of love in its many forms and key among them the familial. Both the boys are in a sense displaced, Mew for reasons not explicitly stated living not with his father but his grandmother and then as a teenager alone following her death while Tong is caught between his grieving parents looking for new signs of stability. Understandably anxious, Tong’s mother still makes a point of picking him up by car though he is already a teenager when such solicitation might seem embarrassing. When she catches Tong kissing Mew, her world is destabilised attempting to reassert her control by asking Mew to stay away from her son fearful of losing him and the life she’d envisioned for his future with a wife and children. Yet through her interactions with June, who is also displaced having lost her parents in some kind of accident, she begins to realise that her need for control is not the way to save her family as they each begin to face their grief and repair their familial bonds accepting both the continuing presence and absence of Tang as symbolised by the family photo taken on their last holiday in which she is not pictured but only because she was standing behind the camera. 

In this way, Mew perhaps gets his answer to whether it’s possible to go on loving someone knowing that you’ll lose them unwilling to live a life without love even if the price is grief and loneliness. Where there’s love, there’s hope according to a Chinese song translated by Mew’s lovelorn neighbour, Ying (Kanya Rattapetch), who becomes an accidental friend of Tong learning to put her hurt and jealousy aside to embrace her friendship with both boys. As someone else puts it, mistakes are just opportunities for change and perhaps doing the wrong thing out of love is better than doing nothing at all. Nevertheless, as the family begins to repair itself, healing in mutual acceptance along with acceptance of their loss, the youngsters discover the strength to accept themselves discovering their place amid the admittedly chaotic streets of Siam Square. 

Love of Siam screens at Rich Mix on 29th May as part of this year’s Queer East.

Original trailer (English subtitles)