Zee Oui is a true-crime horror film that follows the descent into madness of a notorious Thai murderer ‘Zee Oui'. Zee Oui, a colonized version of the name Li Hui, was a Chinese immigrant who moved to Thailand after the war (I'm not sure which) and went on an extended killing spree of Thai children, eating their hearts in a homeopathic effort to cure his severe tuberculosis. He was eventually caught, tried, and shot. Sudasna and Rachjaibun portray Zee Oui as a gentle soul, a hard-working Everyman who was persecuted by hard taskmasters, ostracized by Thai culture, and eventually driven to such a point of desperation that his only recourse was the mass murder of children. His cannibalism is the fault of his mother, his violence is the fault of the war, his sense of alienation is the fault of the Thai society, his anger is the fault of his employers, his desperation is the fault of his illness, and his crimes are the fault of everyone but himself. Indeed, every single moment of this film is intended to exonerate Zee Oui, right up to the utterly moronic and truly insulting final minutes.

Watching this movie is like sitting in front of a street preacher for two hours, but without the delectable apocalyptic stuff or even a semblance of relevant moral claims. It does have a moral, however, and let me tell you what it is so you don't feel inclined to go see it: evil is not a valid category, and becoming a serial killer is just an unfortunate thing that might happen to you. My apologies if I'm offending anyone who thinks this is a reasonable claim to make; I've read my Nietzsche too, trust me, but I still heartily disagree. Even from just a cinematic point of view, you can't make a movie about evil in which you deny that such a thing might exist. This is partly why Zee Oui feels like such a husk of a film; it eviscerates itself.

What is astonishing about this movie is the complete absence of nuance or subtlety, despite the ostensibly ‘controversial' stand that it takes. Portraying Zee Oui as a defenseless angel who is dragged into the murderous muck by the cruel, cruel world is about as stupid as portraying him as a deranged lunatic from the beginning. Sudasna and Rachnjaibun are naively unaware that their agenda is obvious throughout, the result being that this movie feels like a bad piece of propaganda for some sort of Moral Relativity Defense League.

Other bad things about this movie include: the stilted pacing, which leaps over huge tracts of character development in a single bound; the pathetic emotional pleas (‘oh, Zee Oui is sad that they took away his flower'); every subplot, but especially the main one about the journalist. There are some things that might redeem this movie in a small way (the prologue was pretty good), but I was too annoyed by the bankruptcy of its ideas to really notice or appreciate them. This movie is worse than a waste of time; ignore it.

Review by Mark Mann.