[Review] The Medium (2021)
The Medium is a supernatural horror that should be left to the viewers’ imagination. A documentary-style film follows a shaman that lives in a village and encounters a spirit that disrupts the lives around her. This Thai-Korean movie is directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun, who helmed Stutter and produced by Na Hong-jin, director of The Wailing. They depict the movie in a naturalistic style, showing the audience spirits possessing humans, animal corpses, and rituals. What takes place in The Medium starts small, but the bigger threat attacks and possesses everyone that gets in the demons’ way.
Styled as a travel documentary, the movie centres around the life of Nim (Sawanee Utoomma) as the shaman for the goddess Ba Yan in a small village in Northern Thailand. Nim makes the pilgrimage of meeting her in the mountains, taking care of her, and asking for her guidance to heal others in the village. When Nim’s niece Mink (Narilya Gulmongkolpech) starts acting strangely after her father’s passing, Nim suspects that there must be a larger spirit at play. The documentary team explores Mink’s sudden behavioural shift and learns that Mink’s mother Noi (Sirani Yankittikan) was to be the next shaman, but converted to Christianity. Suddenly, Mink’s symptoms become uncontrollably violent and Nim seeks help from other shamans in the village to save her niece and family.
Image courtesy of GDH 559 (Thailand) and Showbox (South Korea).
There is no denying that Asian horror is on another level. Pisanthanakun’s The Medium is horrifyingly incredible, and some of these scenes are difficult to watch. Rituals, trances, and animal corpses in dark abandoned buildings are disturbing. The imagery is crafted this way, using a handheld camera, CCTV footage and night vision mode to capture how these directorial elements escalate that danger in the movie.
When Mink becomes extremely dangerous, the documentary team places cameras around her house. In the captured footage, she crawls around the house, destroying everything in her path, and climbs on the table. Mink sees the camera in the corner and attacks it. Night after night, her behaviour becomes aggressive and one night, when Noi is sleeping on the sofa, Mink climbs on top of her and growls at her mother. The camera cuts and zooms in to get a clear vision of Mink. These scenes are chilling and it intends to unnerve the viewers by using these elements of horror. Shot completely in night vision mode, Mink creeps near the cameras, her eyes glowing in the dark and a foreboding feeling present in the shot to prepare the audience for the horror that follows in the movie.
Image courtesy of GDH 559 (Thailand) and Showbox (South Korea).
Although these techniques are chilling enough, the last 30 minutes of The Medium makes this movie phenomenally horrifying. Set in the background of an abandoned building that is filled with cursed supernatural spirits, a shaman performs a ritual to cleanse Noi and Mink’s bodies. But the ritual turns sideways, and all the characters in the scene become possessed while Mink attacks everyone in her presence. These scenes are shot in two different ways: the first crew shoots the ritual in complete darkness and it’s only lit by a flashlight, while the second crew shoots it in night vision mode. It’s damning to see the crew getting attacked and the equipment falling on the ground to reveal what is happening to them. It’s not just the visual imagery that helps the audience to understand what is happening, but the sound effects of the possessed characters growling and moaning after the crew is another element that is present throughout the movie.
What is incredible about The Medium is Pisanthanakun’s use of camera techniques to shoot the sequences and footage. It is incredibly crafty and serves the narrative by documenting Mink’s dissipating behaviour using a documentary-style format. However, the movie is slow-burn, often focusing on the complicated issue of familial spiritual inheritance. The director takes too much time to explain these issues of the characters’ and why these spirits are haunting Mink.
For Western viewers, they might compare The Medium to Paranormal Activity and The Exorcist, but the truth is, the recipe to craft Asian horror movies will always be different. It’s extremely different storytelling and one that deals with cultural rituals and demonic spirits that are wrongly inherited to another’s body. Pisanthanakun’s The Medium emerges as a contender of Western horror movies rather than a comparison. Its unique and crafty storytelling and camera techniques pave the way for future Asian horror movies.
