The Promise
Released in 2017, "The Promise" is a Thai horror movie, where a ghost comes back to haunt a woman and force her to honour the "promise" of the title. This story gives us an incredible amount of magical effects and we will discuss some of them here.
(6min20s, English with optional English subtitles)
Things accelerate in the second half of this two-hour long movie, and there is literally one idea every two minutes, so I won’t be able to cover everything here. Also, I won’t be spoiling the plot in my video.
First, let’s see a recurring visual that is presented at the beginning of the story :
(Watch the video version to see the scene.)
They don’t write their name in the drawing, but the shape of a hand is identification in itself. This made me imagine the following effect.
You put a paper on a table or a wall. You ask a couple to put their hands on the paper and to trace the silhouette. If you want, they can add their initials in the drawing. Then you tear the paper in half, separating the two hands. Finally, of course, the paper is restored magically and the couple is reunited.
In the middle of the movie, the woman suspects an intruder broke into the appartement and she calls the police, who discover the drawing on a wall :
(Watch the video version to see the scene.)
Drawing the silhouette of a hand that does not exist, is a nice proof of the existence of a ghost and it reminded me of a similar idea mentioned in my video about the movie “The eye”, in which a ghost leaves the trace of her hand in some sugar spilled on a table.
Imagine a flat box full of sand. You ask the spectator to close her eyes and to place her hand on the sand. She stays still for a minute then she raises her hand and opens her eyes. She can see the imprint that her hand created in the sand and, like the drawing of the joined hands in the movie “The promise”, she also sees a second, ghostly hand, imprinted in the sand with hers.
This drawing comes back near the end of the movie. Its appearance is quick, multiplied and drawn with a tormented line, increasing its magical and menacing nature.
The movie is quite clever in the ways it signals the presence of the ghost without ever showing it on screen, which is an efficient technique to let our mind imagine the worst. For example, we see a glass buddha cracking, reminding us of the classic “exploding glass” telekinesis effect. Here is also a spirit manifestation with a fruit :
(Watch the video version to see the scene.)
While watching this scene, I was expecting a bite mark to magically appear on the apple. The director pushes the ghostly logic even further : since the apple is bitten by a ghost, the bite mark is rotten like a corpse would be. Later in the movie, other fruits spoil mysteriously and we suspect they have been touched by the ghost. Once again, these effects of bitten or spoiled fruits are easy to reproduce with our magical techniques.
As I said at the beginning, there are way too many ideas to describe them all here, so I invite you to watch this movie for yourself. You will find a Russian roulette during a video call with the mom and the daughter, as well as a kid’s marbles used as a communication device with the afterlife, or a very magical moment with funeral ashes thrown against a wall and outlining the silhouette of the deceased.
See you next Saturday, for another video !
