Dæn sap

After the death of his wife, Mit moves with his teenage daughter May to a derelict mansion in a Muslim-majority suburb of Bangkok. A thorough sceptic, Mit gets rid of the talismans in the house, defying the warnings of the locals, and in the process unleashes a furious djinn and its 200-year-old curse. As Mit sinks into delirium and self-harm, May must undertake a journey to the south to seek help. Set in the early 2000s, Panu Aree and Kong Rithdee’s The Cursed Land distils Thailand’s political and ethnic tensions into a thrilling, time-hopping horror film. Through Aree and Rithdee’s astute script, Mit’s gradual reconciliation with his repressed personal past comes to coincide alongside a confrontation with Thailand’s unresolved conflict with the Malay peninsula and its inhabitants, many of whom were brought forcibly from overseas as labourers for the development of Bangkok in the nineteenth century. In locating their film within the vernacular beliefs of a Muslim community, Aree and Rithdee expand the horizons of Thai horror cinema, traditionally rooted in Buddhist cosmology. The Cursed Land captures Thailand’s historical spectres up in a bottle while also indulging in all the conventional pleasures and horrors of the haunted house. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)