MACABRE CASE OF PROM PI RAM (Thailand, 2003)
Directed by: Manop Udomdej
Starring: Kamol Sirithranon, Pimpan Chalayonkup, Sompob Benjathikul

Suppannahongsa Film Awards – 2003

Winner – Best Film
Winner – Best Lead Actress - Pimpan Chalayonkup
Winner – Best Script
Winner – Best Editing
Winner – Best Music

In 1977, in the rural village of Prom Pi Ram, Thailand, a young, mentally disturbed woman is found beaten to death beside the train tracks. The case inspired a novel and, now, a movie that, defying all logic, becomes a relentlessly compelling procedural that exerts a primal hold on the audience from some kind of motion picture alchemy. The viewer isn't able to point to one performance, one gimmick, one plot twist or setpiece and say "There — that's what makes the movie." Instead, the flick quietly puts itself together out of beautiful location photography, a gallery of fascinatingly ugly secondary characters worthy of Brueghel and a plot that slowly congeals out of the air into an evil elemental tale that tells us just how low we can go.

Samnian and Lt.-Col. Sookprapdit are two local flatfoots who plod relentlessly after the unknown killer, trying to piece together what exactly happened in their flyblown little chunk of Thailand. Slowly building to a harrowing finale', this movie will stick in your mind like a little rotten spot for weeks afterwards. While the movie bears a passing resemblance to the 2003 Korean blockbuster Memories of Murder, another police procedural about a serial killer and the two country cops who track him down, MACABRE CASE… feels more grounded. It only takes one murder to pull back the curtains on the darkness in this film, and MACABRE CASE… gives ample screen time to its victim (played by Pimpan Chalayonkup) who turns in a magnetically vulnerable performance. Primitively powerful, with a score by British composer Richard Harvey (which he donated, after seeing a rough cut) this film swept the Supannahongsa Film Awards, Thailand’s biggest film awards. But the win was controversial, since the movie has been protested for showing Thais in a bad light, and the director was forced to change the name of the film under pressure from current residents of the village of Prom Pi Ram.

Ultimately, it’s much ado about nothing. What you’ll remember about this movie isn't the cancerous story of human greed and cruelty, but the two decent cops who move slowly but surely forward, convinced that every mystery has a solution, convinced that their little backwater is a decent place to live no matter how much evidence they uncover to the contrary, and convinced that even a dead stranger deserves justice, no matter how long it takes to achieve.