THE SECOND SIGHT (Jit-Sam-Phas) DVD (2013)

SYNOPSIS: JATE (Nawat Kulratanarak) has a psychic ability that allows him to see spirits and foresees the karma of people around him. He can see how unpaid dues in people’s past lives haunt them now. That ability once made him a freak among his friends, so Jate decides to keep his unnatural ability to himself. JOOM (Ratha Pho-ngram) is Jate’s girlfriend and the only person who knows about his spooky gift. Joom doesn’t want Jate to get involved in the hit-and-run case committed by KAEW (Virapond Jirawetsuntorakul), a teenage girl who caused a death of a pedestrian. But Jate knows that what happened was not an accident and he wants use his gift to help Kaew. As Jate digs deeper into the case, something pursues him day and night, while Joom is hounded and terrorized by a demon too. Can Jate rescue Joom and Kaew?

MOVIE REVIEW:

There are bad debts and there’s bad karma in the world. You might be able to default on the former but as shown in The Second Sight, you can’t avoid paying a price for the latter.

Just like Cole Sear in The Sixth Sense, Jate (Pong Nawat) has the ability to see ghosts and possesses psychic ability to foresee future events since young. Living with his musician girlfriend Jum (Yaya Ying), Jate is now a successful lawyer. While driving home one night, Jate encountered a car crash which killed several people on a bridge. Coincidentally the next day, Jate is hired by the suspect’s father to be her defense lawyer. As Jate takes on the case, Jum and the suspect, Kaew (Mild Jiravechsoontornkul) starts to encounter avenging spirits and supernatural events.  

While The Second Sight offers a nice insight to the recurring theme of karma, the execution and storytelling is a total disaster. The three main characters come across as dull and unaffecting not to mention goofy looking ghosts lingering around courtesy of poor makeup effects. At the very least Yaya Ying has a sexy PG13 shower scene to relieve the boredom. Adding to the macabre, there’s a cop with the ever presence of snake spirits around his body reason being you guess it, he loves to eat snakes!    

Director Gun Hongrattanaporn stages and litters the scares like an amateur, one supposedly terrifying scene that involves Jate asking Kaew to lie inside a coffin to appease the spirits is nothing more than a mere bleargh. To worsen matters, he wastes much of the resources on fake CGI, outrageously silly 3D effects and the not so convincing love triangle that the twist in the end doesn’t make much sense at all. And you thought it’s going to tie up the loose ends instead it throws out more questions.

Thai horrors have come a long way since the success of Shutter a decade ago. While it was once a much-lauded genre in the past, it has since turned into some cheaply made, cash-on flicks that nobody will pay good money to watch. The Second Sight unfortunately is one. 

Trailer

AUDIO/VISUAL:

This DVD boasts a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack sufficient for the loud sudden sound effects. Visual is clear and brimming with details.

MOVIE RATING:

DVD RATING :

Review by Linus Tee