This documentary pulls together oral history to trace a very specific New York chapter of gay life in America. Back in 2014, someone found a box stuffed with hundreds of letters sitting in a storage unit in LA. These letters went all the way back to the 1950s and were written to a young guy named Reno Martin, who'd later become known in Hollywood as agent Ed Limato. When Martin left home to chase a radio career, his closest gay and queer friends kept writing to him just to stay in touch. Every letter's signed with a fake name and ends with a warning to burn it after reading, which tells you everything about an era when just being gay, or dressing in drag, could get you thrown in jail. The filmmakers actually tracked down the surviving writers, now in their eighties and nineties, and turned what could've been dry historical digging into something genuinely personal and intimate. The people behind this doc found the original letter writers themselves, several of whom are stil...
The series kicks off at a crime scene that sets the tone immediately, seven bodies hanging from a banyan tree at different stages of decomposition, eyes and mouths sealed shut. Inspector Singha shows up with his team and finds a lone figure at the scene, a commoner named Thup, who becomes the only suspect and witness they have got. Thup is barely holding it together because he has been almost fully possessed by ghosts and is terrified of them, and the strange thing is that they only seem to back off when Singha is close to him. Once Singha starts questioning him properly he figures out pretty quickly that Thup is not the killer, but given how alone and frightened Thup is, and the fact that his entire childhood was spent around shamans, Singha decides to bring him home and use him as a spiritual consultant on the case. Things get more layered when a new inspector named King is brought in by higher-ups to head the investigation and get it closed fast. King and Singha have history, and whatever happened between them did not just damage their personal relationship, it spilled over into their professional one too. The full team starts piecing things together and eventually figures out that the victims are being killed according to the day of the week they were born, Sunday through Saturday, and on top of that, the same pattern of killings has been repeating every five years for the past 25 years. Without giving too much away, the whole series is really about unravelling what started a quarter century ago, understanding the ghosts and the horror tied to it, working out how King and Thup fit into everything, and finally landing on who the killer actually is. Running through all of this, Thup and Singha are slowly figuring out their feelings for each other, and there is also a parallel love story between two doctors on the forensic team.
Calling this a BL would be underselling what it actually is. It is a murder mystery first, one that leans deeply into spirituality, folklore and horror, with BL elements added in. There are plenty of jump scares and somehow I made it through all of them. I also have to say, I usually fancy myself at spotting killers early on, but this one had me pointing fingers at different people all the way through and second-guessing myself constantly, which says a lot about how well the investigation was written. As a thriller I would rate it pretty highly and that is honestly the main reason I stayed glued to it. The romance between Thup and Singha is where the show loses me a little, because the tone of it just does not fit with everything else going on around it. Interestingly, the parallel storyline between the two doctors landed better for me, two people who used to be together now forced to work side by side with all that unresolved feeling still sitting between them. King also ends up being the most interesting character in the whole cast, his arc has real layers to it and he comes across as the most genuinely human person in the show. My one real complaint is that ten tighter episodes would have done this more justice than thirteen. The cast is strong across the board, the story arc holds up, and there is something genuinely unsettling or thrilling happening in pretty much every episode. The ending does leave it a little open about whether the police actually come around to believing in ghosts, considering they all witness things at various points, but the reveal of who the killer is and how everything connects was handled really well, even if some of the folklore references will probably land more powerfully for local audiences who grew up with it.
A police procedural that earns its stripes as a proper thriller, puts two men at the centre of it, and brings in some romance on the side without ever letting that become the whole point. (7/10)
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