[What follows is an expanded version of my thoughts on Thai genre-buster 13 Beloved from when it played Montreal's Fantasia Festival.]
13 Beloved is a film that defies easy categorization, a film that flat out refuses to play to audience expectations. It begins by dipping into the black-comedy pool then gradually indulges those dark tendencies more and more through its running time. It is too bleak and violent by far to be considered a straight comedy, yet too light to be taken as a horror or action picture. What it is is one bitingly on-the-mark satire of media culture fused with a dissection of just how close the hidden heart of darkness is to the surface of pretty much anybody. A major box office success on release in Thailand it stands as proof that you don't need to be stupid to be popular, it marks director Chookiat Sakweerakul as Thailand's brightest young - and I do mean young - talent, and is arguably Thailand's best film of the past few years judged on both entertainment value and intelligence.
Krissada Sukosol - barely recognizable here as the actor who played the lead in the madcap Bangkok Loco - is Phuchit, a meek salaryman struggling at work thanks to the sharkish tendencies of another worker in his offices who is poaching his best leads and clients, a situation that quickly leads to our hero being fired for not producing well enough. Out of work, deep in debt and desperate he is surprised b a phone call that tells him he is participating in a game show and that if he can complete thirteen tasks he will receive a cash prize of one hundred million baht. Task one: kill a fly. Task two: eat the fly. Task three: well, telling you wouldn’t be fair, now would it? the point is that the tasks start small and quickly escalate, every step taking him a little further until there is really no turning back: he must complete the course.
Phuchit's path through the game is a textbook case of death by inches, each successive task bumping him just a little further down the line, each transgression making the next just that little bit easier to swallow until step after tiny step finally leads him leaps and bounds beyond what he ever would have thought himself capable of. And this is the brilliant thing about the film: unlike other efforts with smilar premises in which the contestants are forced to play along Phuchit chooses his own path. He is an entirely free participant. He is led, yes, but he chooses to follow and Sakweerakul does such a stellar job early on of making the entire audience understand and identify with this young man that it throws our own darkness, our own capacity for evil, into our faces. Sakweerakul exploits our own tendencies towards voyeurism as a tool to criticize those exact same tendencies, he recognizes them as an entry point to a dark world where, if pressure is applied to just the right point in just the right way, virtually anything is possible.
Probably the smartest film aimed at Thai multiplexes over the last couple of years, 13 Beloved is a pitch perfect mix of pop culture mass appeal with deeper thought and meaning, all of it tied together by the strong performance of the lead and stellar work by the director. Sakweerakul's script, co-written with the author of the source comic, is a deft balance of character with idea and the young director - he is still only twenty five - is a deft touch behind the camera as well, his sure hand leading the film effortlessly through tricky mood and tone shifts and a series of dazzling set pieces. The human heart of the film, though, is clearly lead actor Krissada Sukosol who completely sets aside the deliberate goofiness of Bangkok Loco for a deeply nuanced, fearless performance. The joke in recent years has been that if you want a male lead in Thailand who can play in his twenties or early thirties then you hire Ananda Everingham because he's the only one - seriously, the guy's been in just about every significant dramatic film made in Thailand over the past few years - but Sukosol is every bit as good and here exhibits a simply frightening range.
13 Beloved has already been bought for American remake in a deal that will apparently see the original buried in the English speaking world at least until the remake is complete so as not to spoil the ending, which means that for the foreseeable future the recent Singaporean DVD release is the only English friendly option. This edition features a reasonably clear - although slightly soft - transfer presented in letterboxed widescreen. There is a slate of bonus features including a making of feature and deleted scenes, none of which offer any subtitling at all, while the feature includes the original Thai audio with English and Chinese subtitle options.