In the Thai horror movie Alone, an old-fashioned Thai wooden house replaces the classic gothic mansion as the setting for secrets, betrayal and things that go bump in the night. But this isn't your average haunted house film. It's the second collaboration between Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, the directing duo behind surprise hit Shutter (2004). Like its predecessor, it delights in pushing the boundaries of the scary movie.
The protagonist, a young woman named Ploy (played by pop star Marsha Wattanapanich), starts believing that her dead sister, Pim, is still with her - literally. Born as conjoined twins, they were separated as children, but only Ploy survived the operation. Now, after years living in Seoul, Ploy is called back to Bangkok, when her mother suffered a stroke.
Accompanied by her sym-pathetic boyfriend, Wee (Vittaya Wasukraipaisan), Ploy is forced to confront her tormented past in the creaking hallways and melancholy darkness of the old house. What she finds is one scare after another, but also some deeper, odder truths that go beyond the typical horror fare.
Experimentation is nothing new to the film's producer, Mingmongkol Sonakul, whose refusal to differentiate between popular and art-house cinema has made her one of the most interesting figures in contemporary Thai film during the past decade. She's one of the few in Thailand working with an independent production company. 'I never think, 'What's the relationship between indie and mainstream?'' Mingmongkol says. 'Just as I would never ask, 'What's the relation between short and tall people?''
Born and raised in Bangkok, Mingmongkol studied film at the San Francisco Art Institute, and worked as an intern at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When she returned home, her father asked what she planned to do. When she told him she wanted to make films, he said, 'It's impossible - people don't do that here.'
At this point, the Thai film industry was in a slump. Regardless, Mingmongkol teamed up with another Thai who had studied overseas, and produced his first feature film. It was a low-budget, black-and-white journey through Thailand asking people to imagine the next episode in a surreal story. It blurred fact and fiction into something strange and beautiful. The film was Mysterious Object at Noon (1998) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and one of the first important works of the so-called Thai New Wave.