The Medium (2021)

The Medium arrives from the Isan region of Thailand bearing a documentary crew, a shaman named Nim, and a curse that has been quietly thinning the men of one family for generations. It is a found-footage possession picture, co-written by Na Hong-jin and directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun, and it conducts itself with the grim patience of a funeral rite. The camera shakes. The goddess, we are told, has chosen a new host. The goddess, it turns out, has nothing to do with any of it.

The film's social conscience, such as it is, amounts to very little in the contemporary sense. Three generations of women orbit one another with suspicion and grief, and the arrangement is dramatic without ever becoming a thesis. The cast is uniformly Thai and Isan, which is simply what the story requires and not a statement of any kind. A dead factory owner, guilty of insurance fraud, lingers in the backstory, and a viewer determined to find a parable about greed could construct one, though the film itself seems more interested in the smell of a boiled dog and the sound of a daughter calling for her mother.

There is no environmental sermon, no meditation on identity, no affirmation of any body. Mink's many voices are spirits, not a diagnosis. What remains is dread, administered generously and without a lecture. The picture runs long, and the mockumentary framing occasionally strains, but it knows exactly what it is: a horror film that earns its horror the old way, through the slow accumulation of ancestral sin. It offers no lessons. It offers a family, a shrine, and a very bad night. In an era of cinema that cannot resist explaining itself, this one simply opens its mouth and screams, which is, in its own limited fashion, a kind of integrity.