BODY

Chon is a twenty-one-year-old boy who has a recurring nightmare in which a mysterious man dismembers a woman's body. His sister convinces him to turn to a psychiatrist who, not considering him crazy, will begin to investigate the murder convinced that it really happened in the past. Meanwhile, Chon starts finding himself in front of disturbing and monstrous ultraterrestrial presences. Reading the plot of "Body" one might easily believe to be faced with a classic Eastern ghost story of the kind that were so popular during the "Ringu" and "The Grudge" period but then stopped being at least imported here... and indeed it is exactly like that! With particular attention to "Shutter" and "Ringu," Purikitpanya's film, here in his directorial debut, brings back to us all the clichés of genre cinema, with the respective positive and negative sides, but which certainly does not stand out for originality or inventiveness. The film thus finds the classic "thousand" characters without any depth who find themselves dealing with the disappearance of a university professor and a series of murders connected to her that seems to be perpetrated by the ghost of the woman herself, with a role reversal in the second part and a "twist" ending by the book. The entire film is played on the sound planes and the appearances of this ghost (and some creatures related to it) that for our protagonist becomes a real obsession. The dictionary of genre films then suggests that he begins to investigate (which is done), that someone from the outside begins to investigate more rationally (done), that a story of revenge comes out (done), and that in the end not everyone is what they seem (done). In short, we have the usual genre film that includes among other ingredients jumps on the chair with the use of sound, characters who do not exist and that the more experienced ones spot after 15 minutes, and a massive dose of CG Animation (which in this case turns out to be really grotesque and embarrassing for the most part). It is also quite amusing that all the car scenes are "fake" and masked in different ways, thus making us find a green screen the first time, a rain so thick that it does not show us the road the second time, and the totally white windows of the ambulance the third time. Irony aside, the film is ultimately enjoyable with the strong points of the genre that work, making everything smooth and pleasant to watch without missing moments of tension and interesting plot developments in the second part. Effective are indeed the ghost (in its non-digital animated version) and the small fetus that wanders around the house, less successful is instead the ghost cat, always digitally animated, that wanders from the first scene of the film, and that is really hard to take seriously; if then we add that it will be an absolutely useless element to the whole we could have easily done without it. Special note for the ending that turns out to be so forced and irritating that it cannot be minimally considered credible, also having an excessive duration since in the last 30 minutes the director tries to take on the arduous task of making us believe a completely nonsensical twist without any success. Nothing to say about the cast that stages the usual stereotypes of the genre film with a protagonist who really struggles to hold the attention and even more to create empathy with the viewer as well as the rest of the "band." Is "Body" recommended in the end? Yes, if you have no familiarity with the genre and if you don't pay much attention to the poor screenplay and animation, no for all the others. It still deserves half a pumpkin more.