In this mysterious short film, Mantra of Neon, Palita Chairit takes us to a small Thai village where the inhabitants are plagued by an unknown, undiagnosable disease.
Sometimes, you don’t need jump scares to make a good horror film, and a film doesn’t need to belong to the horror genre to scare its audience. This is what I felt after watching a short film from Thailand, directed by Palita Chairit. In this film, the Bangkok-based director explores the interrelation between political oppression in her country and its people through a theoretical study involving a young soldier who returns to his village, only to find his father suffering from a mysterious illness. The soldier, played by Boonyarit Wiangnon, comes to the village to close down the forest behind it. We hear a conversation between the soldier and a doctor, who tells him that the forest is sacred, and anyone who enters it will disappear. However, there is something more bizarre than their folktale. People who are ‘infected’ seem to be hypnotized by the glow of neon lights. Is the effect of the light harmful to those who are exposed to it? I tried to observe the actors’ faces in close-up shots when they see the light, and what I found were expressions that were unsettling and frightening. I was staggered to realize that one of the films that frightened me the most this year is an 18-minute non-horror film called Mantra of Neon.
With its modest, small scale in creating its narrative, this film creates an aura so utterly terrifying that it sends chills down your spine by employing eerie visuals of its village. Cinematographer Tham Kattiyakul, who also serves as the editor and sound editor, uses static shots to build an intense atmosphere. His shots aren’t designed to be symmetrically posed for visual aesthetics; rather, there is something very calculated about them, which makes everything shown in this film even more chilling. Where Mantra of Neon truly impresses is in its setting construction, in the unhurried making of a creepy atmosphere, in the attention to detail you can find in the very first scene when the soldier is making his way to the village, the director observing the surroundings through sound, light, and the passage of time.
Writer-director Palita Chairit’s intention in making this film is to portray the invisible consequences of a dictatorship that takes control over communities. Presented in an enigmatic way, even with the highly controlled formalism, it is both a reflection on a political culture that devours people to a state of powerlessness and a mysterious way to embed the viewers with a haunting result.
Mantra of Neon made its international premiere in the Southeast Asian Short Film Competition at the 35th edition of the Singapore International Film Festival, after previously showing at local festivals in Thailand, including the P’KRUB FILM Thesis Exhibition, where it had its world premiere, and the Rangsit University ‘Eyes on Film’ Short Film Festival. It is produced by Pich Rongmuang, whose credits include Melody of Silence (director, 2023) and That Girl Named Pod (assistant director, 2023).
The 35th Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF) is running from November 28th to December 8th, 2024.
