Till Death Do Us Not Part: The Persistence of the Departed in SGIFF 2021
By Clarice Foo

Hailing from Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam, the entries in this year’s SEA
Short Film Competition, Posterity (Audrie Yeo, 2021), The Scent of Rat
Carcasses (Dharma Putra Purna Nugraha, 2021) and Retrace (Trần Thị Hà Trang,
2021) seek to unnerve audiences with the arcane and the taboo. Operating
within the relational perimeters of a family unit, the non-human entities in
each film unsettle the domestic realities of its characters. At once both
unusual and familiar, they invite us to consider what it means for the dead
to persist amongst the living.
I.
In Posterity, a young girl’s homemade funeral for a cruelly dismembered
pigeon inadvertently calls her grandmother’s soul to materialise in the
physical dimension. It is uncertain whether it is the granddaughter’s
consumption of the tidbits meant as ritual offerings for the bird, or her
compassion for a creature that “died miserably” that is the trigger for the
elder’s appearance. But it is clear that the old woman’s brief lingering in
the living world is burdened with the regret of unfulfilled ancestral duty.
She has failed to bring fortune to her descendants.

The grandmother weeps of her failures near the pigeon’s wake and her curious
granddaughter joins her to provide comfort, not fully grasping the woman’s
devastation. Alluding to an elusive task that carries the weight of
intergenerational fate, the elder laments that “Doomed, it’s doomed. Doomed.
I failed again…My Child. My poor child. It will never get to see the light
of day…This is my karma. I will have to live with it. Life after life. Cycle
after cycle.” In referencing the paths of reincarnation in Buddhism, it
seems that more than a simple apparition, the grandmother has in fact been
reincarnated into the lower form of a hungry ghost. This is probably due to
the bad karma she has accumulated as a result of her failing in her duties
towards the girl’s mother. Reinforcing this religious interpretation is how
she is later seen perched on the horse ridden by the Buddhist pilgrim, Tang
Sanzang (唐三藏), of the 16th century Chinese classic, Journey to the West.
This act possibly projects her hopes of advancing into a better realm in her
next life.
In self-reproach of her inability to bless her progeny, the grandmother
kneels on the plate of cockle shells originally intended as an act of
ancestral supplication by her adult daughter to her. Later, the young girl
suffers a similar fate in which her mother beats her for “playing with dead
things” and forces her unto the same shells to pray for forgiveness, fearing
the wrath of the gods. Ironically, in ruining the unhatched egg she intended
to nurture and beating the empathetic innocence out of her, the mother has
unwittingly cut off her daughter’s chance of redeeming the family’s karma
with her goodness. Locked back in the cycle of misfortune, it calls back to
the film’s opening couplets: “前人载树后人凉, 前人砍樹後人殃” (A tree planted by ancestors
provides shade to the next generation, a tree cut down by ancestors brings
misfortune to the next generation).
II.
The Scent of Rat Carcasses shares similarities with Posterity: a creature’s
demise forms the premise for spiritual encounters and both films feature an
offspring reckoning with the departed’s legacy. In Nugraha’s 9-minute short,
one observes a daughter navigating her new role of caring for the household
left behind by her late father, sparking some indirect paranormal run-ins
through the extraction of dead rats.

Still reeling from the loss, Nina’s mother laments, while stroking a small
tuft of her husband’s hair, that for “40 days, his soul remains wandering on
earth”. This pre-empts the viewers of the father’s possible return in the
coming minutes of the film. For Nina, there is routine maintenance work that
still needs to be done in the home, and she steps up to the task while the
mother is left to wallow in her own grief. After unsuccessfully locating the
decaying vermin in the day, Nina is alerted by a disturbance in the kitchen
at night and finds half-eaten and spilled plates of food on the counter.
Though the mess could be easily attributed to still-alive rats scurrying
around, the spent cigarettes suggest something otherworldly.
That the rat carcasses, and smell of decomposition, persist primarily in the
kitchen area, is symbolic of the domestic suppression that the father’s
death has imposed onto Nina. Curbing her hopes of freedom, she now cooks,
cleans and fixes for her mother who cannot care for herself. While the
film’s compressed aspect ratio, abundant use of close-ups and claustrophobic
angles work to obscure the viewer’s field of vision and creates suspense, it
is also a glimpse into Nina’s psyche—trapped by the walls that are closing
in on her. Her stifled frustrations seep out in the passive-aggressive way
she mixes and plates rat poison with rice. And later, when she chops up a
raw chicken, her deadpan face is mismatched with the intensity at which she
brings down the cleaver in precise swift movements.
While Nina sprays pesticide in the kitchen, her mother claims ambiguously
that “Your father put it”, seemingly referencing the pre-existing rat poison
that caused the presence of dead rats to begin with. Their lives have come
full circle—Nina is now cleaning up the remaining traces of her father’s
deeds, replicating his footsteps in exterminating the remaining vermin as
well as assuming wardship of her mother, who is unused to living without a
patriarch. Her shackles to the home are inescapable, and this is most
prominently represented by their pet caged bird. Initially let out by Nina,
the bird eventually returns to its wooden prison through its open hatch at
the end of the film.
III.
Sharing thisphenomenon of infestation following the death of the family
patriarch is Retrace, wherea young boy, Xu, follows the sounds of termites
and grapples with the opaque world of adults and their ancient death rites.
In the process, he mourns the passing of his grandfather, whose spirit still
lingers in the shadows of the home and his monochrome dreams.

lying termites enter the family home in the mountain village during flood
season and congregate primarily around the grandfather’s coffin, latching
onto the drapes of the wake set-up. They eat away at the wood planks of the
coffin while rainwater constantly drips through the roof and soaks the
floorboards. The resonant splatter of raindrops, occasional crackle of the
termites and intermittent ringing of a gong then fuses together to form a
meditative rhythm that lasts for the length of the film and becomes the
backing track to the disintegrating family home and funerary procession. One
watches the already tenuous sibling relations between Xu’s father, aunts and
uncles become even more strained under the heaving blanket of grief and
anxiety brought on by the grandfather’s death, just as the torrential rain
pours down on the roof and landslides smother the roads. One of the aunt
cries, “Everything in the house is about to crumble!”
The boy repeatedly visits a black-and-white flooded dreamscape that appears
to be the transitional limbo between death and the afterlife where the
grandfather resides, and is likely the same conduit through which the
grandfather has visited the grandmother in her dreams. It shares the same
element of rain and water in the real world in both sound and visuals,
bridging the two realms. This dreamscape directly relates to the Matsuo
Bashō’s haiku in the opening of the film, written on his deathbed:
Sick on my journey
My dreams will wander
This desolate field
In one of the dream sequences, a man paddles his raft through a cluster of
half-submerged trees. In the real world, one of these trees was carved into
a human-sized vessel for the elder’s body, and used during the cremation
ritual. Following the traditions of the Black Thai (an ethnic minority that
resides in the northwestern region of Vietnam), the cremation is held at
midnight and starts with the ritual sacrifice of a buffalo. This animal is
believed to accompany the dead to the afterlife as an asset. In the dimly
lit rain, the torches, pounding, chanting, horns and look of horror in the
buffalo’s eyes right before it is slain, are as uncomfortable and terrifying
for Xu as it is for the viewer ensnared in the mysticism of the whole
affair.
The buffalo is later seen with the grandfather in Xu’s dreamscape, which is
then engulfed in flames that consume everything as the grandfather’s body is
cremated. This is in accordance with their custom that one will enjoy a
happy life in muong troi (heaven) if one is bathed in fire after death. Even
so, the adults who stand as witnesses to the incineration of their father in
the dream realm clamour to not let him leave – Xu’s father and aunt thrash
about in the river attempting to reach the grandfather on the other side. It
is a cathartic outpouring of grief that up till then, had been largely
contained. As if in divine synchronicity, the downpour in the real world
comes to a halt, and the river resumes its serene, undisturbed status as the
family’s mourning winds to a resolution.
IV.
In exploring the timeworn questions of what horror in the familiar might
look like, Yeo, Nugraha and Trần have articulated their responses against
larger themes of inter-generational dependency and grief, rooted in the
visual and verbal dialects of their cultures. Through ghostly visitations,
iterations of the dead and yearnings of the living, these films have
attempted to lift the curtain veiling the invisible spiritual world and
float the possibility that the dead are closer than we think.