A film crew sets out to make a documentary about the shaman culture of Thailand’s Isan region. They decide to narrow their focus down to one shaman in particular, a woman named Nim who serves as the vessel for a local goddess. Her older sister Noi was supposed to be possessed by the goddess, but she refused and converted to Christianity. So, the role fell to Nim. During interviews with the sisters, Noi’s nineteen-year-old daughter Mink, who tells the crew that she doesn’t believe in shamanism, begins experiencing odd symptoms. She suffers from blackouts, hears belligerent voices, sometimes behaves like a small child, lashes out at people without provocation, and in brief spells, bleeds from various orifices. Her doctor cannot explain her condition. Nim initially believes that the goddess is moving on to possess Mink, in lieu of her mother. After Mink is hospitalized for a suicide attempt, and the family learns of Mink’s other extreme acts during her blackouts, Nim instead realizes that evil spirits have been progressively invading Mink. When Mink returns from the hospital, their possession is complete. Mink spits up black fluid, cackles, makes lewd propositions, and tears up housewares in full Regan MacNeil-style. Nim calls upon a more powerful shaman to help her exorcize the legion of devils in an elaborate ceremony. Things don’t go according to plan.
The Medium is steeped in a dense broth of Thai folklore. The first half especially functions as something of a real primer on the world of Isan shamans. Though the interviews are with actors improvising in fictional roles, what they say is based on intimate familiarity with rural Thailand’s actual spiritual practices. And the footage of the Loei province countryside and its local feasts and parades is gorgeous. The narrative has one too many family-drama surprises, but this ultimately only adds to the authentic feel of the documentary supposedly being constructed. A cascade of melodramatic shocks is after all de rigueur for the modern documentary. Going into the third act, however, The Medium transitions into found footage territory. As Mink grows more demonic and exceeds the family’s capacity to control her, the crew increasingly relies on hidden camera feeds and chaotic handheld coverage. This leads to something of a logistics disconnect in the conclusion’s explosive epidemic of cannibalistic evisceration. It’s unclear how the footage we are watching could have been recovered, or who was left to recover it. Regardless, there’s a lot to learn from and savor in both halves of The Medium. I definitely intend to watch it again.
TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:
It’s interesting that Nim becomes a shaman through a benign possession by a loving goddess. According to western folklore, i.e. Judeo-Christianity, all spirit possession is an invasive displacement of the self for evil ends. Even when the divine is said to speak or act through the believer, as in Pentecostal folk belief, it just does so temporarily in order to communicate revelation or healing. Only a demon, says western mythology, would take up permanent residence in us. The shaman tradition presented in The Medium challenges this assumption, though. Perhaps we have misjudged the doppelgänger. Perhaps not all alien spirits who come to reside within our bodies, or bodies identical to ours, do so with evil intent. Perhaps it is only our refusal—out of a misguided reverence for absolute psychic autonomy—to share our minds with others that opens us up to truly malign entities.
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