At the Gate of the Ghost

At the Gate of the Ghost is the umpteenth dramatization of the famous Japanese short story "In a Grove," the best known of which is Akira Kurosawa's classic Rashomon. In the year 1567, warrior-prince Larh-Fah (Ananda Everingham) and his beautiful but peasant-born wife, Lady Kham-Kaew (Chermarn Boonyasak), are ambushed by notorious forest bandit Singh Kham (Dom Hetrakul). Kham-Kaew is raped and Larh-Fah is found stabbed to death. At a tribunal held before the local governor, the three main witnesses—Singh Kham, Kham-Kaew, and (via spirit-medium) the dead Larh-Fah—offer vastly contradictory testimonies about what actually happened, mystifyingly implicating themselves. Rashomon has been ransacked by Westerners for everything from the kiddie CGI comedy Hoodwinked! to an All in the Family episode, but this sumptuous 2011 Thai film truly honors the source material, even if it does ultimately skew an existential-dread narrative about the existence (or non-existence) of absolute truth more towards Buddhist precepts by bookending the central story with the drama of a saintly young monk experiencing a crisis of faith. Recommended. [Note: DVD/Blu-ray extras include a “making-of” featurette (7 min.), a behind-the-scenes featurette (4 min.), and trailers. Bottom line: a decent extras package for a fine film.] (C. Cassady)