Review by Kit Rathenar
Having been impressed by Thai director Piyapan Choopetch’s ghost revenge horror My Ex last year, I was hoping for more of the same from My Ex 2: Haunted Lover. Not quite a sequel, though very much in the spirit of the first film, Haunted Lover instead hooks to its predecessor by a bit of meta-cinema: actress Atthama Chiwanitchaphan, who played a supporting role in My Ex, here has the part of Bowie, an actress and sister to main female character Cee. So Haunted Lover opens with Cee and two of her friends emerging from a screening of My Ex, and discussing “Bowie’s” performance in it. It’s a neat if somewhat arch way of linking the two movies together, and also sets a rather self-referential tone that persists on and off through the film.
As with My Ex, the plot of Haunted Lover is simple and in many ways purely archetypal. Cee is in love with the handsome, fickle Aof, whom she catches two-timing her with another girl, Ying. They quarrel; Aof and Cee are in the midst of making up when Ying sees them together, overhears Aof declaring that he doesn’t care for her, and in despair throws herself from a rooftop. By the time her death makes the news, Cee, Bowie, and their two friends are away on the set of Bowie’s latest movie, which is being shot at a beautiful island resort owned by entrepreneur Karn. Aof wants Cee back; Bowie wants Aof to leave her sister alone; Karn is falling in love with Cee; and Ying’s ghost, of course, is determined to destroy them all.
But starting from that very conventional setup, Haunted Lover emerges as something of a film of two halves. While I love Choopetch’s visual direction – he has a real eye for colour, light, and subtle imagery – he’s at his best when handling slower scenes, and the opening half-hour of Haunted Lover is filled with rather too many jarringly quick cuts and short segments that often don’t so much set the scene as obfuscate it. I found the characters less easy to relate to off the bat than those of the original My Ex; Ratchawin Wongviriya’s Cee is especially tricky to get inside the head of. She’s a deeply isolated young woman who doesn’t seem to have any impulse at all to reach out to those around her for help or support, even when she’s seeing ghosts. At least until the action shifts to the more isolated space of Karn’s island resort, there’s a gloss of superficiality to this film; it’s pretty to watch, but it leaves the viewer without much to hang onto it by.
From there on, though, Choopetch’s slower, more poetic style takes control. The focus becomes almost solely on Cee and her sister and friends, Aof’s presence fading into the background and even the ghostly Ying keeping a rather reserved distance, and Choopetch makes the most of the chance to slow down and build atmosphere. However, I rather suspect that Haunted Lover was written backwards from its climax, as the final quarter-hour feels like the sequence that the whole film was waiting to get to: a denouement of trancelike, almost Fulci-esque human and supernatural horror, with the dead, the spirits and nature itself all conspiring to drag our heroine inexorably to a fate all the more terrible for its dreamlike qualities. While the boundaries between reality, nightmare and imagination are fuzzy throughout this movie (to the extent that this very fact is lampshaded in a brief exchange about the role of dream sequences in horror cinema), by the end you start to think those boundaries are gone altogether – only for the final punchline to both restore them, and leave you suddenly and horribly on the wrong side of them. Haunted Lover managed to tap into my atavistic enjoyment of all things dark, phantasmagorical and monstrous while still making my blood run cold, and I’ll always accord any film bonus points for that combination. I love, too, the completely integrated way in which the religious elements of the movie are handled. There’s significant reference to Thai spiritual beliefs and practice, and since Haunted Lover was made primarily for the home market there’s no explanatory catering to a Western viewer. You just have to figure out the significance of these scenes on the fly, and I always approve of art that doesn’t feel any obligation to explain its own culture for the benefit of external observers.
On balance I still don’t think Haunted Lover is as good a film as the original My Ex – the pacing and script simply aren’t as good – but for that final sequence alone I am very glad I sat through this to the end. I really hope that Piyapan Choopetch decides in future films to play to his aesthetic and pacing strengths and do more of this kind of thing, as while there are a hundred directors who can bang out genre horror movies, it would be sad for one with his obvious talents to simply join those ranks. A mix of flaws and strengths; not a classic in itself, but certainly watchable and hinting at something underneath that’s well worth keeping an eye on.
My Ex 2 – Haunted Lover is out on Region 2 DVD on 3rd June, from MVM.