Sutatta Udomsilp – Windows on Worlds

Laddaland (ลัดดาแลนด์) is a strangely haunted place. The people who live there are mainly ghosts, but also haunted by the spirits of financial anxiety and toxic masculinity amid the continual impossibility of an aspirational suburban existence and happy family life. In the opening scenes, a man patiently sets up the new home he’s bought for his family, painting a cherry blossom tree on his daughter’s wall and throwing a Ben 10 quit over his son’s bed. “I’m glad all four of us are finally together,” he sighs to an empty room while sitting alone at his dining table.

But there are already cracks in the foundations of this family which probably can’t be repaired by simply moving into another life. They had already been separated by financial anxiety with eldest daughter Nan (Sutatta Udomsilp) living largely with her grandmother who seems to come from a much wealthier, class-conscious background. Her father Thee’s (Saharat Sangkapreecha) desire to reunite his family breaks that Nan had formed with her grandmother, to whom she is constantly on the phone, and it is unsurprising that she isn’t happy about being forced to leave her friends in Bangkok to live in this suburban paradise. Yet her attitude towards her father is in part motivated by his failure to give her this life, repeatedly reminding him that he essentially abandoned her and is incapable of doing what is expected of a man in providing for his family.

It’s this sense of toxic masculinity that may have prompted Thee to embark on this grand venture. The house he’s bought on an aspirational housing estate in a recently gentrified area is a large family home and as his wife Parn (Piyathida Woramusik) reminds him, the mortgage is bit of a stretch. But Thee is so focused on his dream that he can’t think of anything else. He’s given up his steady job and gone in with a friend on what is very obviously a dodgy pyramid scheme. The foundations of his new middle-class life are built on shaky ground, while every attempt at rapprochement with Nan seems destined to fail as he becomes an increasingly authoritarian father and she a resentful and contemptuous teen.

But times are hard for everyone. The woman next door already lives like a ghost because her husband is violent and abusive. Parn tries to help her, but there isn’t much that can be done. We learn that the man is also, like Thee, under increasing strain from financial anxiety as his factory business flounders amid the turbulent Thai economy. He too is subject to the same sense of humiliation and insecurity as a man who is failing to live up to the codes of masculinity in being unable to provide his family with a comfortable life. Thee doesn’t exactly become violent, but he does later buy a gun after being burgled and fantasise about using it to free himself of his responsibility and the burden of this aspirational life that he can’t really afford.

In an odd way, the ultimate transgression may have been his attempt to hire a maid. A local Burmese woman, she is soon found dead in a house owned by a foreigner and thereafter becomes a more literal ghost haunting the local area and his family in particular due to their attempt to exploit her for cheap labour, perhaps hinting at Thailand’s relationship with Myanmar. Yet it’s also Thee who seems to have been possessed by a vengeful spirit, becoming increasingly cruel and irrational in his attempts to hold on to his home while simultaneously alienating Nan by refusing to listen to her or let her hang out with her new friends. Even Parn begins to turn against him, fed up with his financial fecklessness and pondering swallowing her pride and going back to her mother who loathes Thee for ruining Parn’s life by getting her pregnant in college. Parn suggests going back to work, but that doesn’t fit Thee’s old-fashioned vision of a patriarchal family while he also accuses her of having had an affair with her admittedly sleazy former boss and needles her about leaving him for someone with better financial means. Perhaps this the curse of Laddaland, a liminal space inhabited by hungry ghosts obsessed with fulfilling aspirational, if outdated, ideas of suburban bliss only to end up destroying the very house they were trying to build.

International trailer (English subtitles)

A young woman wakes up in a grimy hotel room with floral wallpaper marked by damp stains. She discovers that the window is frosted over and won’t open while she has no idea of how she got there or who she is but otherwise instinctively knows that the face she sees in the mirror does not belong to her. She tries to call out and hears a voice from an adjacent room telling her to be quiet and that her name is “Anne”. Anne asks her how she knows if she can’t see her, but the voice just tells her that she knows her name is Anne with no further explanation.

As it turns out in Kongdej Jaturanrasmee & Rasiguet Sookkarn’s Faces of Anne (แอน) every girl in the place has the same name and as gradually becomes apparent are all reflections of a single personality. The key Anne discovers that her face seems to change seemingly at random leaving her uncertain even within the bounds of her fractured identity. A psychiatrist tells her that a name is “not as important as who you are” while encouraging her to learn to accept the face she sees as her own, but she remains confused, abstracted from herself, and unable to reconcile her selfhood with its reflection. Meanwhile, she is stalked by a violent demon in the guise of a deer name Vitigo who wanders the hospital corridors taking out any Annes that it finds.

What seems to be going on is an attempt to reintegrate the shards of a fractured personality into a coherent whole only it’s manifesting as a massacre of the self as the demon bumps off each of the multiple Annes insisting that only one, the “real” Anne, can be allowed to leave. But then no one is really only one person but presents a series of personas to the outside world all of whom can be said to be “real” even if otherwise inauthentic. In an illuminating flashback, high school girl Anne chats with another couple of girls about fake online profiles where they can share their “real” selves each of which of course have a completely different profile photo much as the serial Annes have a different face. What we can assume to be the key Anne expresses that she just wants to find a place where she can be completely herself and thinks she has one in a relationship with a boyfriend whose face we never see but had shades both of a man who might be her father and the hero of a video game the atmosphere of which seems to have coloured the aesthestics of her eerie mindscape.

Some might find it easy to dismiss her identity crisis as teenage angst or to suggest that what she’s suffering from is a broken heart though Kongdej Jaturanrasmee & Rasiguet Sookkarn also make reference to a number of problems faced by young people in contemporary Thailand such as online harassment and bullying, sexual harrassment at school and the bad student movement protesting an oppressive educational environment laying bare the pressures on key Anne’s mind that might cause her to become estranged from herself. Asking probing questions about identity, the film wonders if Anne can learn to find herself as distinct from all of these images or if in the end identity and image are inextricably linked to the extent that they can no longer exist distinctly and Anne has no power to identify herself but must rely on the identification of others. Then again, the voice from the other room knows she is Anne without seeing her precisely as she is also Anne, identifying herself in the absence of image.

Eerie and filled with a Lynchian dread in its hellish lightning and grimy hotel room setting, the film turns Anne’s psychodrama into an existential slasher in which she awaits the arrival of the Final Girl. Retracing her steps, she seeks escape in a pattern of trial and error unwittingly at war with herself even as tussles over identity and authenticity while trying to reconstruct a shattered identity by reclaiming the images of the past or perhaps as simply as the psychiatrist had put it learning to accept the face she now wears as her own. Haunting and empathetic, the film has only sympathy for the wandering ghosts of a fractured mind and the vague hope that together they can put Anne together again.

Faces of Anne screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Tag: Sutatta Udomsilp

Laddaland (ลัดดาแลนด์, Sophon Sakdaphisit, 2011)

Faces of Anne (แอน, Kongdej Jaturanrasmee & Rasiguet Sookkarn, 2022)