Filmed in the jungles of Laos, this disturbing tale skillfully employs horror tropes to comment on contemporary social issues.
A young village boy, abandoned by his father, cares for his TB afflicted mother. After witnessing the death of a young woman in an accident, he befriends her spirit, which haunts the dusty road between farm and home. The village itself is poverty stricken, despite interventions by NGOs, and its occupants depend on bartering crops to stave off starvation.
Fifty years later, the NGOs have all left and the boy has grown into an old man—still walking with the girl’s spirit and treated with suspicion by the superstitious villagers. The boy’s isolation and regret over his mother’s death have bred in him a pathological need to ease the suffering of the terminally ill, and he has kidnapped, euthanised and buried several women in the jungle.
When the old man learns that the girl’s spirit can take him back to the months before his mother died, he trespasses into his own past to correct his mistakes, but with dire consequences for the future.
