Death Whisperer Review – Lush Settings, Sparse Scares
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Plot overview: Yaem is a friendly, helpful schoolgirl with five siblings who belong to a farming family in Thailand’s Kanchanaburi province. One day, on their way to school, the sisters encounter a spooky tree with a black-clad ghost standing by it. A few days later, Yaeem begins to show signs of a strange sickness and begins to behave differently, like she is possessed. Led by their older brother Yak, the siblings try to save Yaem from the clutches of a demonic entity that takes over her body.
Directed by Khui Taweewat Wantha, the 2023 Thai horror movie “Death Whisperer” (Thai title: ธี่หยด) is based on a novel called “Tee Yod” by Krittanon, supposedly inspired by real events. Set in the 1970s, the setting for this horror story is near-perfect – a beautiful remote village, which looks stunning in the day and eerily spooky at night. Nadech Kugimiya plays the eldest sibling Yak in the tale, followed by Junior Kajbhunditt Jaidee as Yos, Friend Peerakrit Phacharaboonyakiat as Yod, Denise Jelilcha Kapaun as the oldest sister Yad, Mim Rattanawadee Wongtong as the possessed Yaem, and Nina Nutthatcha Padovan as the youngest sibling Yi.
Despite having a mildly intriguing plot and great settings, “Death Whisperer” unfolds far too slowly and relies on a few gory scenes to scare viewers, some of which are unintentionally funny. For instance, there’s a scene where Yak tries to hunt down the demon woman haunting Yaem, but he ends up being chased in his fields by a macabre-bloodied person (withholding the identity to keep this spoiler-free), and the scene had me in splits. On the other hand, my mom started looking at her phone because she couldn’t stand the gore and told me to alert her when the ghastly scene was over.
The cast manages to hold fort in “Death Whisperer”, especially the actors playing the sisters in the troubled family, and their sibling bond is established sweetly in the first-half hour of the film. Nina Nutthatcha Padovan is the most endearing as the youngest sister Yi and captures all the nuances of being scared witless perfectly.
While the cinematography of the remote village is visually appealing, the special effects for the “scary” scenes were not up to par, with some of the more gruesome scenes featuring severed body horror being far too farcical, which is why some of them were simply funny. It does give “Death Whisperer” a slight campy element, even though it’s clear that the creators were aiming for something on the lines of “Evil Dead” or “The Conjuring”.
The climax for “Death Whisperer” is completely chaotic, with Yaem’s entire family desperately trying to find ways to save Yaem from the violent possession of evil. Some lives are lost and the movie it ends with a surprising twist and a character at the end blatantly announces “This is not the end”. So the story is going to continue in a part II. Some parts of the film were definitely entertaining, and this could be like a “guilty pleasure” title for some horror fans. I think the creators couldn’t maximize the script’s potential and wasted too much time setting up the supernatural sequences instead of delivering chills.
Rating: 5.5 on 10. You can watch “Death Whisperer” on Netflix.
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