Description

Pretty, vivacious young Ting harbours hopes of becoming a popular actress, and she’s certain she just needs that lucky break. It comes along, alright, but her first serious acting job is a downright eerie one. She’s been hired by the police to stand in for murder victims in carefully staged reenactments of notorious crimes. Ting knows that what she’s doing is intended to aid the investigative process, but nonetheless, she takes great pains to offer prayers of apology to the victims she is impersonating. She’s certain they’re watching, fully aware that their deaths have become theatre for the living. She’s right. The dead are there.

The highest-profile case of her budding career falls into Ting’s lap. She is to play Min, a former Miss Thailand brutally butchered in a bathtub. It is a role she will gain a lot of attention for, and one she begins preparing for with extensive research and rehearsal. Her efforts spark her curiosity about the notorious unsolved crime, about who it was who took the life of the beauty queen. Ting is drawn deeply into Min’s life, who she was, how she moved, how she thought –- as Min’s tortured spirit begins slowly, ominously seeping into Ting’s life. But is she there to guide the girl, or are her motive malevolent?

An unnerving twist midway isn’t the only clever device that helps director Monthon Arayangkoon raise The Victim above the stale bracken of the Asian horror wave’s aftermath. Arayangkoon, who cut his teeth on 2004’s Garuda –- Thailand’s first crack at the kaiju, or giant monster, genre initiated by Japan’s Godzilla –- soaked his second project in cold, damp creepiness by making an explicit point of not only basing the crimes that Ting helps recreate on true cases, but in fact shooting sequences in exactly the location where these crimes occurred. The atmosphere of dread that haunts these places is one he’s captured on film, to be savoured by those with a fine taste for fear.

—Rupert Bottenberg

Website

http://www.thevictimthemovie.com/

Credits

Director: Monthon Arayangkoon
Screenplay: Monthon Arayangkoon
Cast: Pitchanart Sakakorn Apasiri Nitibhon Penpak Sirikul Chokchai Charoensuk Kiradej Ketakinta
Producers: Jantima Lieawsirikum
Distributor: Golden Network