Last night—hoping to recapture the thrills and chills of Shutter—I watched a Thai movie called Inhuman Kiss, a genre-bending roller coaster ride that begins as a straightforward supernatural horror film before gradually evolving into a unexpectedly touching (albeit wildly unconventional) love story.
The plot revolves around a Krasue—a young woman cursed to undergo a nightly transformation into a bloodthirsty disembodied head. At first, she tries to ignore her lapses in memory and the general disarray of her bedroom every morning... but when her childhood sweetheart witnesses her dramatic metamorphosis, she can no longer deny the frightening reality of her paranormal condition. To her surprise, her friend’s initial revulsion quickly gives way to sympathy once he realizes that she lacks control over her inhuman instincts; he agrees to act as her accomplice and confidant—which mostly involves feeding her raw chicken in order to prevent her from slaughtering her neighbors’ livestock. The sudden arrival of a gang of fanatical demon hunters, however, jeopardizes the pair’s search for a permanent cure.
Inhuman Kiss is a bit rough around the edges—the visual style is rather flat, the narrative feels unnecessarily bloated, and the overall tone becomes gratuitously depressing as the climax approaches—but its likable cast of characters (especially the protagonist, a misunderstood monster in the tradition of Universal’s Frankenstein), novel premise, and legitimately impressive makeup effects ultimately elevate the material.