The Coffin (2008)
By: Basile Lebret
Tags: Movies, LGBT, Horror, Thailand, Cinema

Ekachai Uekrongtham’s movie sat on my shelves for the longest of time. I often talk about my dusty shelves, how it’s often a mistake when I left an art piece to rot on them. Yet I think every consumer of fiction has such a thing, a place where all you should have read, all you should have listened to or watched, sits, whithers and die.

I first heard of this Thailandese flick through the Mad Movies magazine, the French equivalent of Fangoria, and its premises actually made me drool. After participating in a ritual in which one has to fake a burial, a man and a woman both encounters strange occurences.

Sure, in the late 2000s, I was in highschool, skipping class, smoking weed, watching A LOT of horror movies. It was before I actually stepped in the industry. In fact, it was before the whole experience sort of drained me and left me an empty shell who didn’t watch as much films as he did. Poverty would do that to you.

When The Coffin got released over here in France, despite its pretty cool art, I couldn’t watch it. It’s only in the last few years that I stumbled upon it on a copy in a thrift store. Might be because its French publisher went out of business. We’ll never know.

If you are a regular reader, you might know a bit about me, though and yesternight when I finally decided to watch The Coffin, I had to research a tad about it.

From what I get Ekachai Uekrongtham was a theater director for at least 8 years before he decided to make movies. Such a path doesn’t surprise me. Clive Barker, Shin’ya Tsukamoto, Aislinn Clarke, Robert Eggers all went through the same course. Hell, Juleen Compton who directed The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean, started in theater. There seems to be a thin line between theater production and the film industry. Maybe it’s because both art forms see the director having to deal with a bunch of department, including actors, costume, finance. Now that I think of it, the link between those two are HUGE. A painter could maybe envision a sculptor’s way of doing thing, but movie, just like videogames or theater, are process in which your capacity to appease human conflict and to direct a BUNCH of people (not only actors) plays a huge part in the outcome of your project.

This may be what led Uekrongtham into the movie industry. What’s interesting is the Thailandese director first made Beautiful Boxer, a movie about a thai boxer pursuing competition only to pay for their sex change operation. Accross my research I’ve stumbled upon an interview in which the director stated he’d never encountered Nomg Thoon, the person on which the biopic was based, before he directed the flick. It appears this didn’t angry the boxer for, afterwards, she would go on to work with Uekrongtham on a theater play. Life can be funny like that.

It was right around this time that Uekrongtham started working on The Coffin. Still, in 2005, he would release Pleasure Factory, his second feature talking about prostitution this time, which would be selected in Cannes. Around that era, The Coffin appeared to be solely about a young man performing a Thai ritual in order to confront death.

I’ve read reviews stating that there exists two movies within the Coffin. One is a movie about loss and redemption, about people, regular people having to deal with loss and grief and memory, and the second film is a mundane Asian horror flick as the industry used to throw at every spectators back in the early 2000s.

Despite his first successful attempts as a director, it seems Uekrongtham wasn’t able to get the funding he wanted for this new film. As an outsider looking in, it’s not really surprising that, when he told producers he wanted to make a movie around a guy trying to heal his wife’s comatose state through a burial ritual, before being haunted by visions of her, some of the investers went: “Oh, sort of like The Grudge, am I right?”

According to some sources, this was why the movie turned into a ghost story when it should have been more a of supernatural drama. The internationnal cast, featuring actors and actresses from Japan, Thailand and the US indicates a way to secure funds. And the fact the production company came from Singapore, South Korean and Thailand is also a strong clue.

And I have to admit, there are two stories in The Coffin. One takes a young bride-to-be through the ritual to try and cure her cancer which she’s concealed from her every relatives, while the other follows a man going through the ritual in order to take his wife out of a comatose state. And watching it I was reminded of Christophe Gans’ Silent Hill which may well be the best video game adaptation to ever exist. Despite being a good movie, I had a problem with this film from my very first viewing. You see, to me, Silent Hill captured perfectly the ambiance of the whole video game franchise which was the most important thing, yet at the time I couldn’t understand why there existed a second story line involving Sean Bean in the real world.

If it wasn’t fot the ending which at least was damn poetic, I thought the whole sub-story of the searching husband totally pointless. It’s in an interview that I head Gans states that the producers had demanded there be a male character for gamers would never like a female hero.

Watching The Coffin, knowing it was centered around a lone man at first, I’m reminded of this. Isn’t there a slight possibility producers turned to Uekrongtham and asked him to have a female MC because “it was common in Asian horror” at the time? It might have been a good choice because The Coffin seems to have made its money back in Asia.

Discrepancies wouldn’t stop there for it appears thereexists two cuts for the movie. One made the round in Asia and centered much more on horror and gore, while the other one the Director’s cut appeared more slow paced and more involved in its main characters’ struggles.

With a making of that lacks any sort of interview, although showing us cool trick as those that might have been used to shoot Buried, there is little promotional material to stand on. And even fewer recorded interviews. The three actors who got asked question simply answers platitude on why they accepted the project in the first place.

I’m used to this, but the movie is now thirteen years old and I think it lost to time. This paper is just my small reminder.