Shudder hasn’t had a lot of new releases this year. The first one was V/H/S/94. This time, they have given us the Thai film The Medium. Let’s see if Shudder handles foreign films better than Netflix.

Nim (Sawanee Utoomma) is a shaman in the Isan region of Thailand. When she attends her brother-in-law’s funeral, she finds her niece, Mink (Narilya Gulmongkolpech), acting strangely. Even though Mink’s mother/Nim’s sister, Noi (Sirani Yankittikan), doesn’t want anything to do with shamans, she needs Nim’s help to cure Mink. Is it really the goddess Ba Yan calling Mink to the shaman life or is it something more sinister?

When I make lists of movies I’m going to review, I try to do as little reading on the movie itself as possible. I look up when it is coming out and where I can watch it. So when The Medium started and it looked a lot like an actual documentary, I thought I messed up. (Not that I am averse to documentaries, I watch a lot of them. It’s just not the Halloween vibe I’m going for with these reviews.) But, no, this isn’t a documentary. It is a really, really good documentary-style. Totally had me fooled.

Thanks to the pseudo-documentary style, I was completely pulled into the movie at the beginning. I cared a lot about Nim and I thought the movie was going to center around her. It doesn’t. Not at all. Nim is, at best, a third tier character. Don’t get me wrong, Nim is very important and moves a lot of the story along. But The Medium, at it’s core, is about Mink, Noi, and Noi’s relationship to religion. Everything and everyone else is secondary to those themes.

The Medium was such a good movie. I did think the ending was a little weak but I’m going to chalk that up to societal differences. I know that, in very broad and general terms, Asian media prefers to have more open endings where Western media likes to tie all of the plotlines up in a nice little bow. With that said, The Medium is definitely left enough open for a sequel or a Paranormal Activity-type of series of movies. I would love to see another movie that takes place in this universe.

There is no need to ask me if you should watch this. Yes, the answer is yes. Go watch it tonight.

I struggled when I was deciding whether or not I wanted to add horror series to the 2021 Halloween list. On one hand, there are some interesting series that I would really like to see. On the other hand, a series takes a lot longer to watch and I only have so much time to watch all of the movies! As you can tell, I decided to attempt to watch all of the series, as well as the movies, this year. The South Korean Netflix series, Squid Game, was first on the list.

A group of 456 people, most of whom are severely in debt, participate in six children’s games in order to win a large sum of money. However, they aren’t told that if they lose a game, they lose their life. Once they find out that little twist, how will that change how they play the games?

When I first started watching Squid Game, it reminded me of the 2007 Japanese drama Liar Game. In both of them, the main character has a debt that needs to be repaid and they are invited to play a game in order to win money to pay off said debt. The big difference is that people die in Squid Game. They just go into more debt in Liar Game, which the contestants act like they will die from it.

I don’t want to spoil the show too much because Squid Game really is something that you should watch. Besides the expected deception and bloodshed, there is a lot of heart in some of the characters. Though I think my favorite part is that you really don’t know what is going to happen. There’s a lot of horror movies where I can guess who is going to die or what the villain is going to do next. I figured that the main characters were going to make it pretty far but as Game of Thrones has shown us, main characters can die early in a series.

While the creator hasn’t said anything about a season 2, I do hope that there will be another season. I really want to see where the characters go from here.

OK, stop reading now and go watch it immediately! Go!