Great horror movies are hard to find. They have a tendency to fall into a spike-trap of cliches, cheap jump scares, people doing face-palm worthy acts of idiocy at crucial moments, and depressing endings. Fortunately, a new generation of horror directors has grown wise to these pitfalls, resulting in truly refreshing and horrifying entries to the genre over the past decade, such as Hereditary, The Witch, Don’t Breathe, and The Babadook. Thai horror movie The Medium caught my eye when it appeared on Netflix recently, because it looked to be a part of this new age. Sadly, a very impressive first half gives way to schlocky commercial-grade mayhem that we’ve all seen far too many times before.

The Medium adopts a mockumentary format to give its narrative an air of authenticity. Indeed, one could easily mistake its opening moments for real life thanks to the solid and realistic performances by the cast, particularly Narilya Gulmongkolpech (Mink) and Sawanee Utoomma (Nim). The premise stretches its credibility, however, when the film can’t decide if it still wants to pretend it’s a documentary or switch to a traditional film narrative. There are moments when the “documentary team” film the characters at work and during very private moments where no sane person would plausibly be comfortable having a camera crew hovering around them, and the whole thing really hits a breaking point when scary moments are accompanied by ominous music and loud “Gotcha!” stings. At any rate, if one can learn to ignore this distraction, the first hour of The Medium is brilliant. It incorporates elements of Thai folklore and superstition into its narrative, and we see how these traditions are a prominent factor in familial ties. At the center of this is Ban Yan, the local deity that protagonist Nim is a shaman of. A lot of the unusual activity that has occurred throughout Nim’s family history is commonly attributed to this deity, but Nim’s sister and niece, Noi and Mink, are disbelievers and instead have turned to Christianity. The local tradition decrees that someone must represent Ban Yan as a shaman, and although that responsibility initially fell to Noi, it became Nim’s after the former became a child of God.

The movie cleverly pulls a lot of punches in its first half, opting for a slow and mysterious build that makes the events that unfold disturbingly plausible. I was reminded of 2018’s Hereditary as it deftly blended the mundane with light sprinklings of scares, as Nim’s niece, Mink, starts exhibiting increasingly strange behavior. Nim is certain that this is the result of Ban Yan trying to force her way into Mink’s soul in order to make her the new shaman, but of course it turns out to be something far more sinister than a benign local deity.

Like the best horror movies, The Medium excels when it uses its supernatural plot as a vehicle through which darker secrets in its characters are revealed. By investigating Mink’s paranormal behavior, the family members are forced to confront uncomfortable truths from their past. These include the revelation that Mink and her brother, Mac, had an incestuous relationship before the latter killed himself out of shame, and the family’s ancestors being responsible for gruesome atrocities back in the day. Being rural folk, they are quick to lean on their traditions and rituals to cure Mink of her possession, and it’s only when their convictions falter that things go straight to hell. In perhaps the movie’s most disturbing moment, Nim’s faith is dealt a huge blow when she finds the statue of Ban Yan decapitated.

Sadly, about an hour and twenty minutes into the movie, things really go off the rails when The Medium goes from a slow-burning family drama disguised as a distinctly Thai-styled possession tale into a deranged, mindless B-movie bloodbath with cheap scares straight out of The Ring and V/H/S. The shift in tone is so abrupt and is such a betrayal of what the first half was building towards, that it’s as if the movie was handed off to a different director at that point. We get copious Paranormal Activity-esque surveillance camera shots of Mink shambling around the house like a demonic marionette as she defiles her mother’s house and eviscerates the family dog, and later, a full-blown massacre in which possessed acolytes slaughter the poor documentary crew while the entire family goes insane and kills each other. The filmmakers, evidently jacked up by the gory spectacle, are only too happy to show you each and every gruesome death, one after the other, as if to impress you with how twisted they are. A guy falls to his death and shatters every bone in his body! A guy smashes his head repeatedly into a concrete wall! Dudes get their throats chewed out! A woman gets stabbed in the jugular! A woman gets set on fire! By the time the sixth or seventh documentary crew member gets his intestines torn out by zombie priests (while filming himself getting murdered), you almost forget the movie The Medium used to be an hour ago. What was meticulously built up over the film’s first half commits suicide, and in its place is cinematic junk food cooked up for a far less discerning customer.

The great irony of The Medium is that, much like its characters, it keeps the faith through much of its journey until the most critical moment. It feels like an introverted kid who doesn’t realize how cool he is by being a silent, strong type, and starts acting like an outgoing extrovert to fit in. It’s a shame, because there is in fact a message underneath it all about how these traditions cut both ways; on one hand, they can make people feel closer to their cultural origins and bring families together. On the other, they can burden entire generations with insurmountable misfortune should their ancestors engage in acts of evil. This could have been evoked more effectively in the second half by leaning more on building up the characters as they react to more restrained and less fantastical supernatural events, instead of the painfully cliched scary long-haired possessed girl trope and the overwrought zombie massacre at the end in which literally everyone loses their damn minds. In the end, The Medium’s message is rudely interrupted by an avalanche of senseless gore. Whatever the filmmakers’ intensions were behind this narrative choice, I can only imagine, but the conclusion is a strangely cynical and jarring experience that doesn’t live up to its potential.