In one of her possessed acts, Mink forces her uncle’s hands on her bare breasts and rubs her body fluids on his face, claiming that he loves young girls, which clearly suggests that the man has some dark history hidden from the family. Her mother runs an illegal shop that sells dog meat without getting into questions of morality or ethics, the spirits of these killed animals do come back for revenge, much like those of other killed animals, birds, fish, and trees. The film does not specify these spirits, but it is easy to guess that it is the evil spirit of everything around Mink that takes control of her. As Santi explains, the wrong ceremony performed by the local shaman had left Mink exposed to even more evil, vengeful spirits that possessed her. Now that nobody else was left, all of these had rushed onto Mink. When he married Noi, all these curses against him had joined forces with the bad karma of Noi, who had evaded the goddesses’ spirit and also changed her faith. His grandfather had been stoned to death by rebellious laborers, and the countless lives that the owners had taken away, all cursed against them before dying.Īll this gradually rotted the family-Wiroj’s father had poisoned himself when he was caught setting his own factory on fire for insurance money (which might have further killed workers) Wiroj had suddenly been diagnosed with cancer and died soon after, his son had committed suicide. Noi’s husband, Wiroj, and his family, had been cursed by thousands of people as they had been treacherous employers to poor workers.
There is a satisfying sense of information as well as mystery about the spirits that haunt Mink in the film. Nim suspects that it is Mac’s spirit trying to possess his sister/lover, and she starts a ritualistic ceremony to stop the evil possession. She finds out that Mink had an incestuous relationship with her brother Mac, and that he had actually died by committing suicide. Fearing that she might lose her, Noi is now ready to let her daughter be possessed, but Nim now doubts that the spirit is not of Bayan but something else. In a helpless state, she tries to commit suicide, but is found by her mother and rushed to the hospital. She had been working in the state recruitment office, but her sudden irregularities, like sleeping over at her office in a drunk state and things being stolen, made the office boss doubt her.Ĭhecking the CCTV footage, he finds that she has been sleeping with multiple strangers at the office premises, and fires her. After her pains grow even more, she admits to the crew that she has been having the same dream every night-a huge man wearing a red loincloth stomps around licking blood off his sword, and a decapitated head on the floor tries to tell her something. Lisa, her best friend, tells the crew that Mink has been acting strange and shows them a video where Mink acts like a young child who pushes away other children to seek attention. Bayan then chose Nim instead and possessed her for life.Īs days go by, Mink’s condition deteriorates steeply as she becomes a heavy drinker and her physical ailments grow more intense. After her aunt’s passing, the next in line was her elder sister, Noi, but Noi did not want to become a shaman and declined the inheritance.
In her childhood, she had seen her grandmother possessed by the spirit, and then her aunt after the old lady’s passing. She goes on to explain that the spirit of Bayan had possessed women in her family over many generations. Nim is the shaman of one such spirit goddess, Bayan, who she says is a good ancestral spirit protecting her village for a very long time. The region has an extensive population of believers in animism, meaning that they believe every life form has a spirit, good or evil, and the worshiping of spirits commonly exists here. She says that for the Isan people, spirits have existed all through history, perhaps even before the existence of any religion. Nim appears in front of the camera, as if sitting for an interview and knowing that a camera is following her around, and introduces the culture of the Isan region (northeast Thailand) with respect to spirits. After many such interviews, they decided to focus on the life of Nim, a woman living in north-eastern Thailand who is also the shaman, or medium, for the local goddess Bayan. The film begins with a text claiming that in 2018 a documentary team went all across Thailand studying the lives of shamans, i.e., people who supposedly act as mediums between the real world and that of the spirits.
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