Tag: Davika Hoorne

Inherit (คุณยายวรนาฏ, Banjong Pisanthanakun, 2026)

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Playing out as something between Teorema and An Inspector Calls, Banjong Pisanthanakun’s Inherit (คุณยายวรนาฏ) asks its audience to suspend their disbelief to an unusual extent, but certainly takes those willing to go with it on a wild ride from ancient curses and super monks to corporate coverups, social inequality, and the moral corruptions at the heart of a seemingly “nice” upper-middle-class family. In fact, the more you learn about this incredibly compromised group of people, the harder it is not to start rooting for the malevolent centipede entity even if she does seem to kill and feast on beautiful young women in order to preserve her youthful appearance. 

At least, one has to wonder why no one explores rational explanations for the arrival of a glamorous woman claiming to be the family’s estranged octogenarian great aunt, Woranart (Davika Hoorne), seeing as she looks about 35. Everyone just seems to take her explanation that she’s undergone every anti-ageing and plastic surgery option going and they’ve all gone swimmingly at face value. Then again, perhaps you really can look this good when you have seemingly infinite funds at your disposal. For some reason, it never occurs to the family that she might just a young person trying to take advantage of them financially or get revenge for one of their many transgressions, the most public of which is a scandal surrounding a chemical leak from father Olan’s (Trin Settachoke) factory that they covered up after it caused sickness, death, and birth abnormalities in the surrounding community.

Olan is, however, the only one who thinks there’s something not right about Woranart and correctly guesses that only black magic could make a supposedly elderly woman look far younger than her middle-aged niece, Sudaduang (Sinjai Plengpanich). Woranart’s glamorous appearance further undermines Sudaduang’s self-confidence, leaving her wondering if she too should try plastic surgery while otherwise insecure in her relationships with husband and sons. She evidently had a strained relationship with her mother whose funeral the family had travelled to attend. The other attendees gossip that Sudaduang was not a good daughter while her mother was alive, putting her in what they call “a nuthouse”, while giving a glowing eulogy. Sudaduang had been close to Woranart in her childhood and therefore may feel a desire to reconnect with her now that her mother has passed away. 

Woranart, however, shows more interest in the family’s daughter Oui (Thitiya Jirapornsilp) who is first seen guzzling pills at the funeral and is kept on a tight leash by Sudaduang having apparently suffered a series of childhood illnesses. In some ways, it’s easy for Woranart to seduce her by offering her the sense of freedom and impending adulthood that’s denied her by her mother. Meanwhile, as Woranart seems to worry away at the family’s secrets, Oui has fewer reasons to reject the supposed “demon” given what she’s just found out about her father and brothers who may well be the “real villains” she describes them as. Woranart makes cryptic comments that it’s time for Oui to become “a real woman”, and much of the battle seems to be for Oui’s soul as she’s faced with a choice of whether she’s going to continue to go along with her family’s wealth and privilege despite knowing what she knows, or accept Woranart’s “gift” and a life without pain or suffering. 

On her arrival, Woranart had had all the Buddhist statues removed from the cottage on the family’s estate where they put her up, telling Oui that she doesn’t believe in karma because it’s “too slow”. That may suggest she’s come here with a mission of revenge after all, and it is later revealed that the centipede deity has held a grudge against Sudaduang’s family for over 800 years, though no one can remember why. She does seem to be intent on destroying them, but then again some might say they deserve it and were in the process of destroying themselves anyway. Nevertheless, it’s Oui who is finally left to decide what exactly she wants to “inherit”, neatly inverting the logic of the Western slasher along with that of a conservative society to claim her own agency. Anchored by a perfectly pitched performance from Davika Hoorne as the alluring great aunt / foxy 800-year-old demon meeting her match in a vengeful nun (Warattaya Nilkuha), Banjong Pisanthanakun’s take on this classic tale is an absolute riot that never forgets its feminist heart.

Inherit screens 9th/10th October as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Pee Mak (พี่มาก..พระโขนง, Banjong Pisanthanakun, 2013)

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If you suddenly discover your spouse is a member of the undead, do you really have to break up with them or is it alright to go on living with a ghost? The conventional wisdom in Banjong Pisanthanakun’s horror comedy take on the classic folktale Mae Nak Phra Khanong, Pee Mak (พี่มาก..พระโขนง), is that the dead cannot live with the living, but perhaps love really is strong enough to overcome death itself and living without the person who means most to you really might be more frightening than living with an all-powerful supernatural entity.

In any case, much of the comedy revolves around the desperate attempts of Pee Mak’s friendship group to make him realise that wife, Nak (Davika Hoorne), is a ghost. The men had all been away at the war and have now returned but the village seems different and the villagers are all avoiding Pee Mak. Gradually, it dawns on them that Nak actually died due to complications from a miscarriage after going into labour alone at home given Pee Mak’s absence. But Pee Mak himself remains unaware of this fact, or so it seems, and refuses to listen to his friend’s attempts to convince him which are also frustrated by their fear of Nak and the worry that she might curse them if they reveal her secret.

The four friends are each played by the same actors and have the same character names as those in the shorts Banjong Pisanthanakun directed for 4Bia and Phobia 2, and as in those two films there is a degree of confusion about who is and isn’t a ghost. On their return, the men are passed by a ferryman who is returning the bodies of dead soldiers to their families explaining that the graveyards are all full. This of course hints at the destructive costs of the war and haunted quality of the depleted village to which not all men have returned, but also leaves the door open to wondering if the five of them are not already dead themselves and have returned home only in spirit without realising. Pee Mak, after all, sustains a serious injury from which he miraculously recovers driven only love and the intense desire to return home to his wife and the baby he’s never met who must by now have been born. 

Meanwhile, Nak tells Pee Mak that the rumours of her death are greatly exaggerated and mostly put about by a local man, Ping, who had been harassing her while Pee Mak was away at the war and was upset by her rejection. Ping then later also accuses Nak of killing his mother after she drunkenly told Pee Mak about Nak being a ghost, but in general the villagers only avoid Nak until one rather late intervention rather than try to exorcise her spirit. Nevertheless ghost or not, it does not actually appear that Nak is particularly dangerous. She does not drain Pee Mak’s life force nor randomly attack other people and at most only seems to glare intensely at his friends who might just be annoying in far more ordinary ways especially as one of them seems have developed a crush her.

Which is all to say, is it really so wrong for Pee Mak to enjoy a happy family life with his ghost wife who may have developed a set of really useful skills such as super-stretchy arms and the ability to hang upside down? Banjong Pisanthanakun constantly wrong-foots us, suggesting that perhaps everyone’s already dead, or maybe no one is, while eventually coming down on the side of the power of love to overcome death itself. Despite the film’s setting in the distant past, he throws in a constant stream of anachronistic pop culture references that might suggest this is all taking place in some kind of universal time bubble but also lends to the sense of absurdity in what is really a kind of existential farce as the gang attempt to figure out who’s alive and who’s a ghost before eventually realising that it might not really matter. Dead or alive, it seems like life is about just being silly with your friends free from the folly of war, which is surely a message many can firmly get behind.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Useful Ghost (ผีใช้ได้ค่ะ, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, 2025)

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Right at the beginning of Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost (ผีใช้ได้ค่ะ, Phi Chaidai Kha), we see a man creating a classical-style relief that’s positioned in a tranquil spot surrounded by nature. It features people from all walks of life, a mother and her child, a monk, a scholar, a soldier, a labourer and so on, as well as a goat, and is later revealed to have the title “democracy monument”. But as soon as it’s put up, it’s brought violently down as developers move in to replace this oasis of peace with a modern shopping mall. 

The construction gives rise to more “dust” which is what’s polluting the country, directly linking rampant capitalism with the erosion of democracy. Even the home lived by the self-proclaimed “Academic Ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan) may one day be consumed as the traditional streets are replaced by yet more upscale shopping opportunities. In an effort to get rid of the dust that’s plaguing him, he buys a vacuum cleaner, but it turns out to be haunted and coughs in the middle of the night, spitting out all the dust he made it swallow. 

“Dust” is also a term that’s come to stand in for those exploited by this increasingly capitalistic society whose lives are afforded little value, such as factory worker Tok who died after being exposed to too much dust while working at a factory producing vacuum cleaners. Meanwhile, the factory owner’s son has just lost his pregnant wife, Nat (Davika Hoorne), to a respiratory illness caused by dust. Nat has also possessed a vacuum cleaner and reunites with her broken-hearted husband, March (Witsarut Himmarat), but finds herself increasingly compromised after sucking some of the dust out of a government minister’s eyes.

Nat’s desire to stay in the mortal realm longer than is proper is reminiscent of the classic ghost Nang Nak, but what she also becomes is a kind of class traitor increasingly involved with the oppressive regime and betraying her own people to ensure her personal survival. Government minister Dr Paul gets her in on his programme chasing ghosts through dreams and banishing them from people’s memories in order to erase their existence and history. When people refuse to give up their ghosts, he has them given electroshock therapy so that they forget them, as he once tried to do to March before Nat made herself useful to him. And so “dust” and “ghosts” have now become metaphors for those who resist as the souls killed not only during the 2010 massacre but Thammasat University massacre in 1976 rise again to make their presence felt. 

According to the Academic Ladyboy, that these ghosts came back at all is itself an act of resistance, as if these memories themselves could become reminders that resistance is possible and things weren’t always this way. He loathes Nat for the choices that she made in turning on her own, but she was also facing other kinds of oppression in never being accepted by her husband’s upperclass family who in themselves become a symbol of autocratic elitism. Her mother-in-law, Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), who owns the factory and is unsympathetic towards Tok insisting his death was nothing to do with the working environment, submits herself to them too because like Nat she didn’t belong either and felt she had no other choice. Her eldest child Moss was taken away from her because she spoke a Northern dialect and they feared the child wouldn’t learn standard Thai. Now she tries to talk to her son’s Australian husband in Teochew, only for Moss to roll his eyes and say no one knows how to speak that outside Thailand. Just as they rejected Nat for being an outsider, they rejected Moss for being gay until he became useful to them.

The longer Nat stays beyond her allotted time, the more it corrupts her so on restoring her corporality she would betray even March, who has come to sympathise with the ghosts, in order to be allowed to stay and maintain her position. She’s the “useful ghost”, from a certain point a view, but from another, all the others are “useful” too in keeping the spirit of resistance alive. Quirky and surreal with its tales of haunted hoovers, obsessive bureaucracy, and factories where singing is randomly banned, not to mention truly awesome shoulder pads, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s deadpan absurdist drama is deadly serious where it counts right until its intensely cathartic conclusion.

A Useful Ghost screens as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)