Motherly ghosts are Southeast Asia's fiercest creatures, as they cling to their memories with a vengeance. In Marn-Da (The Only Mom), a Myanmar-Thai haunted-house horror, a motherless child wanders her old colonial house -- she was already dead, sure -- looking for love and hugs. When a new family moves in, the girl-ghost finds the perfect mother she never had and the old skeleton in the closet comes tumbling out.
A Burmese Gothic, Psycho-inspired double-whammys and James Wan-style jump scares are thrown into this fairly entertaining mix. The Only Mom is set largely in a handsome house somewhere in a Myanmar province, where the ghosts of the past sneak out of glass-plate photographs to spook new tenants. The cast is all Myanmar, led by beauty queen Wutt Hmone Schwe Yi and actor Naing Naing, while the story was written by a team of Myanmar and Thai writers. Chartchai Ketnust, a Thai filmmaker who's carved out a market in Myanmar with his first film, From Bangkok To Mandalay, directed this ghost tale with assurance; the film was a hit in Myanmar when it opened last month and is now playing on limited Thai screens (naturally, in the areas with a high density of Myanmar workers, but also at SF CentralWorld).
It's a straightforward haunted-house story -- until the final act, when the script probably flaunts too many twists. A family with a young daughter moves into an old house following the father's appointment as editor of a newspaper. Soon the girl finds a new friend: another girl of the same age in a vintage outfit who shows up only at night to play. What follows is a possession -- not the demonic kind but a childish one -- and the secret of the previous owner and his dysfunctional parenting emerge. To untangle the mess, the mother has to risk the (literal) quagmires and travel into the unknown to rescue her child. In a rare move for ghost films from this part of the world, religious figures (monks, imams, etc) have no part in defeating the angry ghosts: it's maternal sacrifice that redeems it all.
If you need your weekly fix of fear, The Only Mom does its job. But more than that, the film features moody, attractive cinematography that shames a lot of Thai films (it was shot by Teerawat Rujintham). And while the influence is clearly the post-2010s horror films of the Insidious school, The Only Mom contextualises it in Burmese lore and visual cues, such as with the appearance of a cross-dressing shaman or those devilish potholes that swallow humans for dinner. Only when the film has to tie up the loose ends does it go a little too wild, and yet by that point we have seen enough to glimpse the potential of this Myanmar-Thai hybrid. Maybe the future of Southeast Asian cinema lies in this kind of cross-border creative co-operation, with or without ghosts.
