Hungry Ghosts

Mutable earth: reality blur, possession, bodies.

Content warning: cannibalism

Apichatpong Weerasethakulâ’s Mekong Hotel is a beautiful meditation on death, violence, and the afterlife set at an out-of-season hotel located on the banks of the Mekong River.

Films about out-of-season hotels populated by ghosts, the undead, and various lost souls are one of my favourite micro-genres. I would also recommend the deranged Bad Things, a queer, no-budget The Shining, if this kind of low-key melancholy is your jam.

Mekong Hotel is a film that’s maybe about a group of actors rehearsing scenes from a film about a pop ghost that possesses characters in turn, or maybe a film about a pop ghost that possesses characters in turn.

There is a mother ghost and her daughter, both of them possessed and hungry for the entrails of livestock or humans. There is an artifice to their performances; the gory scenes feel imported from slasher movies. The possessed crouch over bodies, mouths bloody, eating obviously fake viscera.

Set to the backdrop of gentle music, and located in idyllic surroundings, the film unspools like a dream. The actors slip in and out of character. It isn’t always clear which parts of their histories belong to them, and which to the characters they’re playing. Artifice and performance are made visible but also blurred.

In one beautiful scene, the mother and daughter are talking, sorting wool, and sharing a domestic moment when the mother gives a harrowing speech about her life of possession. How unhappy it makes her to be violent, to eat others.

Instead of a bleak maternal abject, the film shows a daughter comforting her mother. There is a reverence and tenderness here from a child who can love a mother even when she doesn’t seem able to love herself.

To speak of what cannot be spoken about, and to treat it tenderly and with compassion, even if that thing causes shame, that is what art, what writing can do.

We might wish we could tell our own parents or children or siblings or friends or lovers these things. Things like, I am ashamed. I wish I wasn’t like this. I’m frightened you will leave me.

And we might crave hearing responses that show us we are seen as whole just as we are.

That we may be possessed by something dark, but that isn’t all we are.

To be witnessed, to be seen. That is what writing can do.