My Ex 2 : Haunted Lover (แฟนใหม่) is a 2010 Thai horror film, a sequel to My Ex.
The plot (no ‘Haunted Lover’ on the titles) takes the once original but now increasingly hackneyed approach of treating the first story as an actual film that we first meet our cast leaving a screening of, complaining that it was unrealistic and that the leading actor was a dick (correct on both counts). Amongst them is Atthama ‘Bowie’ Chiwanitchapan, who starred in the original film and here plays herself, and who is now cast in a new horror film alongside sister Cee (Ratchawin Wongviriya). Cee has caught her boyfriend Aof (Thongpoom Siripipat) at the cinema with another girl, Ying (Marion Affolter), but when he is confronted, he swears she means nothing to him and that he was just using her to borrow money. Ying hears this and hurls herself off the roof of a tall building. Vengeful ghost time, anyone?
Bowie and Cee head to an exotic island resort for filming, taking friends Ae and Bee (and yes, that’s right – the characters in this film are called Ae, Bee and Cee), where strange and spooky occurrences start to happen. Ae and Bee are scared off by a Thing under the bed (in a curiously inconclusive scare sequence) and Cee is constantly tormented by images of the dead girl. But are these genuine hauntings, hallucinations of guilt ridden dreams?
My Ex 2 is a little better than the original film, thanks to a third act plot twist that makes little sense in terms of the characters but nevertheless gives the film a little more edge. Unfortunately, getting to this point involves hanging around with characters so vacuous that they seem to be borderline simpletons, and no amount of false jump-scares or brief ghost imagery (very much of the clichéd Asian sort) can get around that. None of the characters seem real enough for you to care about them, and as with the original film, the men all come across as complete assholes while the women are such simpering fools that you really want to slap them into reality. Given that the message of both films seems to ultimately be that women need men to complete them, this is probably a feminist’s nightmare.
The final act of the film improves things considerably, but whether or not that is enough is debatable. Like it’s predecessor, My Ex 2 is too insipid to actually dislike, but you have to wonder just who are the people who are voluntarily coming back for more of this largely vacuous stuff ?
David Flint – Strange Things Are Happening
