Taweewat Wantha’s Attack 13 is unabashedly commercial entertainment — a horror movie made with the kind of cleanness, galloping pace, and pulsing score typical of much contemporary action cinema. However, within its mainstream parameters, it finds openings for some genuinely nasty imagery and social observation, and it creatively crossbreeds high school melodrama and supernatural horror conventions.
The film begins with Jinhandra’s (Korranid Laosubinprasoet) arrival into a histrionically Darwinist high school. Bussaba (Nichapalak Thongkham) rules the campus like a Mafia don, subjecting her peers to a range of violent humiliations (everything from extortion and locker room water torture to the forced removal of dog waste from her shoe). Conflict escalates when Jinhandra challenges Bussaba’s supremacy, and a series of circumstances lead to Bussaba’s suicide by hanging in the school gym. An unknown shaman resurrects Bussaba, and her revenant spirit begins tormenting Jinhandra and her friends. Mystery accumulates as the film charges through various scenes of supernatural attack: who summoned Bussaba’s spirit, and why? Will Jinhandra and her friends banish Bussaba back to the grave before she has claimed all their lives?
Attack 13’s most compelling features stem from thematic collisions — between past and present, physical and metaphysical, and the shifting roles between subordinator and subordinated. It juxtaposes the imagery of ancient shamanic magic with contemporary adolescent life, opening with an arcane forest ritual replete with squirming insects and reptiles before cutting to a school gymnasium volleyball match. Bussaba’s predatory, incorporeal specter attacks with decidedly corporeal gusto, puncturing eyeballs and smashing faces into mirrors with cruel abandon.
Despite its grotesquerie, the film’s shamelessly familiar genre trappings and liberal use of CGI sometimes engender a curiously distancing, weightless quality. More often, however, the film uses its digital effects to create inventively macabre images of spectral malevolence and mutilation. Its sleek, digital aesthetic is consistent with its contemporary settings, and with its concerns surrounding public image and online selfhood (key plot points hinge on text conversations, iPad passwords, and selfie exchanges.)
There’s plenty to admire in Attack 13. The third act veers into pleasantly surprising territory with several unexpected deaths and plot revelations. Laosubinprasoet, for her part, boasts the screen presence and instincts of a natural movie star. Director Wantha intelligently stages his stalk-and-kill sequences in various settings: locked cars and urban streets, dorm rooms and childhood homes. It eventually upends the Manichean morality of its first act, exploring power as something relational and ever-shifting rather than monolithic.
Published as part of NYAFF 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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