The Medium

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A young woman grimaces into a mirror, her teeth and lips stained with blood as she touches her mouth with her fingers.

I cannot stress how much this movie started with an A. Since it’s a mockumentary / found footage film, it’s kind of important to sell how much it feels like an actual documentary and they were killing it. Lots of good interview snippets with locals, supporting B roll of the Thai countryside, and most importantly, a likable medium that they follow named Nim who takes her job seriously, but not so seriously she can’t poke fun at herself a little bit. I was disarmed and genuinely loving this movie.

Then it went into full “Exorcist” mode where, instead of continuing the tone of the first 1/3 of the film, the documentary team just starts filming the medium’s niece, Mink, who is now fully possessed and doing random, gross, creepy possessed-girl shit. And it’s great for what it is, if it felt like the rest of the film was set up for that tone, it’d absolutely fit! It was still a great film but it just didn’t feel consistent by the ending and it also could’ve been a bit shorter - with a run time over 2 hours, it gave itself enough time to get itself in trouble and feel long-winded.

As a parting note though: I always have to take these foreign horror films with a solid grain of salt, not because I shouldn’t expect them to be scary or anything, but because there are cues and nuances to their respective culture that I’m just not going to be able to pick up on. I am not the target audience and maybe with a fuller understanding of Thai culture, I would have gotten even more out of the last half of the film. Food for thought.

Score: B-