We have a very strong start as we open upon a story that is sort of like an Asian phantom of the Opera with incest. A young girl and her brother live happily in a small village until one day traveling visitors bring a man the girl starts to fall in love with. Her jealous brother, with a deformed face he always hides, decides to wreak havoc, and the ghost of the young girl gets endowed into a drum that travels the country haunting whoever happens to be close by.
Tthhhheeeeennnn the movie reveals that it's just a story being told, and that three young Thai women at a restaurant are telling each other ghost stories. The thing about these types of narratives is that they fundamentally ruin the point of the stories in the first place. Horror is made to terrify, right? So how can we appropriately fear for characters' lives and souls when we know they're fake? Even beyond the level of fakenss inherent in any medium, we now are twice removed from the characters' psyches: once because we're actually watching a television screen, and twice because we're watching characters tell stories about characters that don't exist diagetically.
Worse, the next two stories turn out to have that wonderful flavor of, "Huh, I've heard variants of this before." Yep, suddenly we move away from the interesting story (which also, interestingly, had much better dialog, direction, cinematography, and just about everything) that held our attentions for 40 minutes, and then we follow two other stories for another hour and a half that are, when you break it down, merely urban legends.
Gee, and I was so enjoying the beginning.
To be fair, the third story isn't THAT bad, and since it's a mystery it's a little nice to follow. But the second story is just soo boring! It's very disappointing to be enjoying yourself and then have the director say, "Okay, so, we're done with that, now to move on!" Two things you should never do in a horror movie because it's no longer fresh and now it becomes slightly insulting: never have it end up being just a dream, and never have it end up being just a story.
--PolarisDiB
