‘Death Whisperer’ (2023): Characters as Cannon Fodder

Directed by: Taweewat Wantha || Produced by: Narit Yuvaboon

Screenplay by: Sorarat Jirabovornwisut, Thammanan Chulaborirak || Starring: Nadech Kugimiya, Rattanawadee Wongthong, Denise Jelilcha Kapaun, Peerakit Patcharabunyakiat, Kajbundit Jaidee, Arisara Wongchalee

Music by: Terdsak Janpan, Banana Sound Studio || Cinematography: Unknown || Edited by: Unknown || Country: Thailand || Language: Thai

Running Time: 121 minutes

A horror movie with a decent — i.e. well thought out and explained — diegetic mythology, memorable special FX, and creepy imagery should be a recommendable film to most audiences. You’d think that with something like co-writer-director Taweewat Wantha’s Death Whisperer, a supernatural possession-oriented spooky movie set in rural Thailand, but you’d be wrong. Thanks to the universal filmmaking problems of longwinded storytelling, bad pacing, an unearned, inexplicable dark conclusion, and way too many characters, Death Whisperer burns whatever goodwill it builds through its memorable visuals and fun horror set-pieces.

By the end of its first act, you can tell that Whisperer is another descendant of both the demonic possession melodrama of The Exorcist (1973) as well as the rural “cabin in the woods” iconography of Evil Dead (1981, 1987, 1992). It goes without saying that those are respectable, understandable sources of inspiration for most any supernatural horror film, but the “problem” is that Whisperer is only the 426th riff, English-language or otherwise, on the work of William Friedkin and Sam Raimi, and Wantha doesn’t execute his version of, well, other filmmakers’ visions in a consistent way. All the most effective sequences are lifted in part or wholesale from those aforementioned Hollywood franchises, which could be fine — I don’t behoove science-fiction movies for their ubiquitous references to Alien (1979, 1986, 1992) and Predator (1987, 1990) or action movies for replicating  Die Hard (1988) — were it not for how ineffective Death Whisperer often is outside those references.

Top: Early apparitions of the supernatural demon/spirit/entity antagonist hint at promising scares to come in Death Whisperer. Bottom: Other than a fun surrealist finale inside a car, however, there aren’t too many memorable scares.

Most egregious of Whisperer’s problems is the massive ensemble cast without a firm, identifiable protagonist. Perhaps Thai society, the rural areas most of all, have larger families than most Western countries (I don’t know), but for a story this straightforward, the principal family of 8 members strong (two parents and six children) plus a variety of supporting characters is way too damned large. The main cast could’ve easily worked with half that number of children and/or even a single parent, while the script’s indecision to choose between the eldest son (Nadech Kugimiya) and eldest daughter (Denise Jelilcha Kapaun) as its main character limits their arcs and engorges the film’s runtime.

The spiritual possession plot-dynamic around which the film’s conflict revolves isn’t too notable aside from brief creepy nighttime sequences in a cornfield, an interesting detail where a possessed family member’s scream causes others in the vicinity to lose consciousness, and a neat surrealist finale in a moving vehicle in the third act. As stated before, many of the visual motifs are lifted from other, more famous horror movies but are executed alright here, and their heavy usage of gore is appreciated most of all.

What undercuts those fun sequences almost as much as the bloated ensemble cast, however, is the film’s sheer length (121 minutes), which is about 30 minutes longer than your average BlumHouse or A24 horror production, as well as its unsatisfying ending. I’m all for horrifying conclusions to horror movies, of course, but you need to rationalize (i.e. establish ahead of time) how your protagonists will fail in the end a la Smile (2022), The Empty Man (2020), Hereditary (2018), Ringu (1998), etc. The ending of Death Whisperer feels edgy for the sake of it, mirroring the horrific events of the somewhat superfluous prologue but with no narrative justification. Taking over two hours for a simple possession/exorcism plot-device, moreover, feels overindulgent with pacing this mediocre.

If you’re like me, your most probable source for random southeast Asian genre flicks is Netflix, as there are numerous popular international features on the platform that are difficult to find anywhere else. There are so many options from all over the world that it’s difficult to sort through the crappy fluff to find the gems even if you consider yourself a rather knowledgeable cinephile like myself. While I wouldn’t describe Death Whisperer by Taweewat Wantha as crap by any means, so much of the movie is your standard boilerplate genre filler. If you have an eight-member family as your screenplay’s narrative focus and can’t justify their diegetic existence, you have to give them something meaningless to do… hence the movie.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

SUMMARY & RECOMMENDATION: Despite decent production values and respectful nods to classics of the genre, Death Whisperer stumbles under the combined weight of numerous screenplay contrivances and an unnecessarily gigantic cast for its narrative scope, running out of gas well before its unjustified sequel-bait epilogue.

— However… the blood and gore FX are appreciated, while several of the Evil Dead callbacks in crop fields and a memorable finale are fun. None of the castmembers, while hard to distinguish, give bad performances.

—> NOT RECOMMENDED for two hours of this stuff…

? Can we stop it with the creepy smiles from goofy possessed girls, already?