The Thai film Ghost Game (La Tha Phee), directed by Sarawut Wichiansarn, has evoked controversy in Cambodia for dredging up a strange representation of the horrific Tuol Sleng, the interrogation-torture center used by the Pol Pot regime in Phnom Penh during the late 1970s that processed 15,000 prisoners, of which only six persons survived torture. The film begins with the selection of eleven young Thai participants for a reality TV show, the survivor of which would win five million Thai Baht (about US$125,000). The participants appear altruistic in regard to how they will use the money and reasonably healthy and psychologically secure. The contest involves going to the Thai-Cambodian border and thence by small riverboat to an isolated rural detention center inside Cambodia known as S-11. Although Tuol Sleng, known as S-21, was originally a school with classrooms in an urban setting, Ghost Game depicts the facility as more extensive in size, with an underground as well as an annex in back and other imagined elements. The eleven contestants (in actuality, the first contestants of a reality TV show, Academy Fantasia, that is still broadcast from Bangkok) are accompanied by a TV crew, including the production's director, with videocameras installed in the various rooms and venues where the contestants are to play the game. Each day, the director has the contestants follow a scenario. On the second day, for example, two are placed in chains, three lie down on top of skulls in enclosed chests, and others explore "Skull Island." However, on the first night, a ghost of someone who was killed at the facility emerges to scare one of the participants. Later, others are frightened by apparitions and possibly sound effects (as the film's thud sounds may be part of the filmscore or perhaps the sounds created by the TV director). On May 9, 2005, the supposed anniversary of the massacre of all those detained at S-11 in the 1970s, ghosts aplenty emerge, including an apparition of the former commander of the center who seeks to claim more victims from the contestants. In short, all hell breaks out, details of which no film reviewer would dare to reveal. What is most surprising is that the contestants are uniformly frightened by the ghosts, many of whom seem passive and pitiful, rather than trying to communicate with them. Many Thais believe in the existence of ghosts, both good ones and bad ones, so the response of the contestants, who are in their late teens or early twenties, seems quite inappropriate. The commandant is clearly a villain, but the rest of the ghosts appear quite harmless. The Bangkok Post perhaps best characterizes the meager quality of the film by conferring a rating of 1.5 stars. MH
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