Tag: insulin

The Pool

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Day (Theeradej Wongpuapan) wakes up. There’s a lot of blood. He’s at the bottom of a drained, six metres deep swimming pool with a crocodile advancing towards him. But how did he – and for that matter the crocodile – get there?

Flash back to six days earlier. Day and his girlfriend Koi (Ratnamon Ratchiratham) are working on a movie set. He looks after the swimming pool and as a bonus his dog Lucky has to heroically jump from the poolside over the water in the schedule’s very last shot. The dog leaps, the crew gets the shot, it’s a wrap, everyone’s happy. In fact, Day is so happy that when almost everyone else has gone, he dozes off on a lilo in the pool while its draining. When he wakes, the water level has gone down so far that he can’t get out. Somewhere on the ground nearby, a flier announces an escaped crocodile is on the loose.

Around this seemingly flimsy opening, going one day at a time up to seven days, director Lumpraploeng constructs an edge of the seat slice of narrative suspense which deserves a place in that pantheon of suspense thrillers which take place in small locations often with reduced numbers of characters. This pantheon includes:

Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944, in a lifeboat);
Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948, in one apartment);
Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971, in a car pursued by a lorry);
Dead Calm (Philip Noyce, 1989, three people on two boats);
Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1997, in, um, a cube);
Phone Booth (Joel Schumacher, 2002, in a phone booth);
Buried (Rodrigo Cortés, 2010, in a coffin);
Frozen, 2010, Adam Green, a ski lift);
Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012, in a stretch limo);
Locke (Steven Knight, 2013, in a car); and
Arctic (Joe Penna, 2018, in the Arctic following a plane crash).

None of those are what you might describe as creature features though, unless you include the brief sequence where a snake enters the coffin in Buried, the wolves on the ground below in Frozen or the bear in Arctic. But the crocodile in The Pool turns it into a full blown creature feature as well.

The trapped man in the pool’s obvious means of escape would be his girlfriend turning up and lowering a lifeline or ladder. She does indeed turn up, but then owing to a rapid-fire series of events, she quickly ends up injured, perhaps fatally, in the pool with him. Other possible ways out include a helicopter overhead, a drone, the latter’s owners descending into the pool to retrieve it and the lowering of a bamboo ladder at the poolside. There’s also a manhole cover in the middle of the pool, screwed down until our hero finds a way to remove the screws, leading to a small underground cylindrical service tunnel (shades of both Dr. No, Terence Young, 1963 and Alien, Riley Scott, 1979, the latter indubitably a creature feature, the former not so because the script cut out the giant squid Bond battles in the book) which might or might not provide a way out.

Then there’s the crocodile which following a run in with Lucky (in which we won’t tell you if the dog lives up to his name) the crocodile ends up on the floor of the swimming pool. And the fact that the hero is diabetic and his insulin shot is sitting ready in a syringe on a table beside the pool, beyond his reach.

The crocodile must be mostly CGI because otherwise at least two cast members (three if you include the dog) would have been unlikely to survive the shoot. This educated guess is based on the plethora of animation and computer technicians on the end credits, not on the croc itself which is pretty convincing on every level. The two main actors put everything they have into their performances too and the director brilliantly rachets up the tension throughout so that, as the piece proceeds to its conclusion, you’re thoroughly gripped.

While it’s hard to locate this film in specific Thai or wider East Asian culture, it shares a certain kinship with Thai action star Tony Jaa vehicle Ong Bak 2 The Beginning (Tony Jaa, 2008) which has a heart-stopping sequence with the hero fighting for his life in a flooded crocodile pit. The Pool is every bit as heart-stopping from start to finish. If no enterprising UK distributor has yet picked this up, then one of them really ought to do so.

The Pool showed at the The London East Asia Film Festival, in 2019, when this piece was originally written. On Shudder in July 2020.

Wet Season

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

It seems to be constantly raining in urban Singapore. Ling (Yeo Yann Yann) is forever sitting in her parked car injecting insulin. She has a job teaching Mandarin to a class in a local boys secondary school. Half a dozen of them are such poor students that she sets up a remedial class after hours to get them up to speed, but while they’re made to attend, they really aren’t interested. With one exception.

Wei-lun (Koh Jia Ler) will be in trouble with his parents if he doesn’t do well in Mandarin. As the other boys bunk off the remedial class with the slightest excuse, it pretty quickly develops into Ling teaching Wei-lun on a one-on-one basis. He doesn’t live that far from her home, so she often gives him a ride home in the car afterwards, unaware that behind her back he has for a long time been taking pictures of her with his mobile phone in class.

Ling has been trying to have a baby with her husband Andrew (Christopher Lee Ming-Shun) for some eight years. He’s long since lost interest and their relationship is severely strained, with Andrew hardly ever at home working long hours in his high pressure, financial job. Thus it falls mostly to Ling to look after Andrew’s wheelchair-bound father (Yang Shi Bin) who lives with them who is unable to dress, bathe or feed himself and requires a high level of care. He spends his days when Ling is out at work watching TV reruns of kung fu movies.

As Ling’s tuition of Wei-lun proceeds, he asks if she can accommodate his attending after school wushu (a form of martial arts) classes. She starts to tutor him in her home so that she can keep an eye on her father-in-law at the same time. The boy seems to get on with the elderly invalid, at least in part because of a shared enthusiasm for martial arts. Eventually, Wei-lun invites her and her father-in-law to watch him represent the school at a national wushu contest. Focused on becoming pregnant and frustrated by Andrew’s lack of romantic interest in her, Ling fails to notice the boy’s increasingly obvious infatuation.

The constant rain seems almost like a fifth character in this drama beating on car or building windows and sweeping across roads making driving conditions treacherous. While it looks naturalistic, the rain has been staged for the cameras at considerable expense. It adds much to the overall atmosphere of the piece, not least to the sense of impending disaster.

Both Yeo Yann Yann and Koh Jia Ler appeared in Anthony Chen’s earlier Ilo Ilo (2013) but the director didn’t set out to cast them again, it just worked out that way. The child actor is now considerably older than he was on the earlier film and, as such, almost unrecognisable.

In this newer film, both leads give terrific performances, with Yeo’s nuanced portrayal of a woman under numerous forms of stress finely observed while Koh’s role as a teenager completely out of his depth in a world of more complex adult issues convinces.

Various details come together: the incessant rain, Ling’s stress caring for an infirm and ageing parent scarcely helped by pressures of trying to conceive a child with little encouragement from an increasingly distant spouse, the increasing isolation of teacher and student as they increasingly find themselves sharing each other’s company. Chen never loses his grip delivering his uncompromising vision, a powerful experience which never lets up. Here’s hoping an enterprising UK distributor gives this the release it deserves.

Wet Season plays in the BFI London Film Festival and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer below: