The Medium

• Shot as a mock-documentary/found-footage hybrid in the Isan dialect, the film keeps its documentary framing device intact from the opening interviews straight through the chaotic climax.
• The story originated with South Korean director Na Hong-jin (The Wailing), who co-wrote and produced it; Thai director Banjong Pisanthanakun (Shutter, Pee Mak) directed. It's a co-production between Thailand's GDH 559 and South Korea's Showbox.
• The Medium swept Thailand's 30th Suphannahong National Film Awards (2021) with 13 wins, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Narilya Gulmongkolpech (Mink), and Best Supporting Actress for Sawanee Utoomma (Nim).
• To play Mink's physical deterioration, Narilya Gulmongkolpech gained weight for early scenes, then lost roughly 10 kilograms as the character wastes away, and worked with both Thai and Korean movement consultants to choreograph the possession sequences.
• The film was shot on location in Loei province in northeastern Thailand, the real Isan region whose folk shamanism the story is built around.
• It skipped a U.S./Canada theatrical release entirely, dropping exclusively on Shudder on October 14, 2021.

Ba Yan never existed, or abandoned the family long ago — Nim's entire practice is self-delusion, and Mink's possession is the return of something the family buried, not a spiritual calling. The documentary crew's presence is what forces the facade to crack, making them complicit in the catastrophe.

The film is a critique of spiritual tourism — both the Bangkok-style crew's and the audience's consumption of rural Thai religious practice as spectacle. The climactic failure isn't Ba Yan losing a fight; it's incompatible belief systems (folk animism, modern skepticism, the act of documentation itself) colliding in a way that was never going to end clean.

Mink isn't possessed by a single entity — she's a spiritual battleground. Ba Yan's line has spent generations not talking about whatever the family's ancestors actually did to earn hundreds of vengeful spirits, and the failed exorcism doesn't summon something new so much as finally let the dam break. Nim's own late-life doubt about whether Ba Yan was ever real suggests the 'benevolent spirit' story was always the version the family needed to believe.

A documentary crew travels to Thailand's Isan region to profile Nim, a village shaman who has spent years as living host to Ba Yan, an ancestral spirit passed down through the women in her family. Things turn dark when Nim's niece Mink starts exhibiting violent personality shifts, night terrors, and physical symptoms no doctor can explain. Convinced Ba Yan is punishing the family over an earlier refusal to accept the spirit, they arrange a ceremony to transfer it into Mink. The ritual backfires badly: Mink isn't hosting a single deity, she's become a vessel for hundreds of restless spirits — victims her own ancestors beheaded generations back. A final exorcism at an abandoned factory spirals into mass possession and violence, and the crew keeps the cameras rolling as the family tears itself apart.