The film was simple: a son returns to his village to find his estranged father dead under mysterious circumstances. He doesn't mourn. He suspects. The blood of the title wasn't the father's. It was the son's. Every night, the son dreams of a different death—drowning, burning, a fall from a great height—and wakes with a small, real wound. A cut on his palm. A nosebleed. A bruise shaped like a hand.
The problem with making a film about blood, Somchai had learned, was that it invited it. During the last week of shooting, the lead actress—a beautiful, silent woman who played his mother’s ghost—had stepped on a rusty nail. Tetanus. She survived, but lost two toes. The cinematographer, a drunk Frenchman named Pierre, had sliced his hand open while adjusting a practical light that was supposed to look like a bleeding artery. He’d needed seventeen stitches. blood (2004 english subtitles)
He had actually said: “This is the only way to wash.” The film was simple: a son returns to
He reached for the remote. He didn’t turn off the film. He turned off the subtitles. The blood of the title wasn't the father's
Somchai lit a cigarette, though the ‘No Smoking’ sign was stuck to the monitor with yellowing tape. He was the director, the star, and now—three years later—the sole survivor of Blood (2004). The film had premiered at a festival in Rotterdam, won a minor award, then vanished. A critic had called it “a slow, wet scream into a void.” Somchai had been proud of that.
[Sound of water dripping. A knife clatters on tile.]
He’d said something else, of course. Something in rough, street-level Thai that the European distributor had politely smoothed into poetry. The real words were: “His blood is already dry. I want new blood.”