Wisit Sasanatieng’s The Murderer (เมอร์เด้อเหรอ ฆาตกรรมอิหยังวะ) is his second film made for Netflix, after The Whole Truth (ปริศนารูหลอน). With The Murderer, he moves away from supernatural horror—his most consistent subject matter, in films such as Reside (สิงสู่), Senior (รุ่นพี่), and The Unseeable (เปนชู้กับผี)—and delivers his first horror-comedy, a Thai genre hybrid popularised by Yuthlert Sippapak’s Buppah Rahtree (บุปผาราตรี) franchise.
The film’s greatest impact comes from its colour grading, a welcome return to the oversaturated palettes of Wisit’s Tears of the Black Tiger (ฟ้าทะลายโจร) and Citizen Dog (หมานคร). It also makes some pointed observations on xenophobia in Thai society: the Western protagonist, visiting his bigoted inlaws, is discriminated against throughout the entire film. Comedian Mum Jokmok gives a great performance as a frustrated cop; like the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, he gives conflicting explanations for the origin of his facial scar.
The Murderer is structured like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (羅生門), with each surviving character narrating their own unreliable account of how a sequence of improbable killings took place, dramatised in a series of flashbacks. The moral of the tale is spoon-fed to the audience in the final moments: “You can’t just blindly believe what people say. Pay no attention to all the noise out there. Make up your own mind.”
The film’s greatest impact comes from its colour grading, a welcome return to the oversaturated palettes of Wisit’s Tears of the Black Tiger (ฟ้าทะลายโจร) and Citizen Dog (หมานคร). It also makes some pointed observations on xenophobia in Thai society: the Western protagonist, visiting his bigoted inlaws, is discriminated against throughout the entire film. Comedian Mum Jokmok gives a great performance as a frustrated cop; like the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, he gives conflicting explanations for the origin of his facial scar.
The Murderer is structured like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (羅生門), with each surviving character narrating their own unreliable account of how a sequence of improbable killings took place, dramatised in a series of flashbacks. The moral of the tale is spoon-fed to the audience in the final moments: “You can’t just blindly believe what people say. Pay no attention to all the noise out there. Make up your own mind.”
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Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/th-en/title/81597188
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