Teresa Reviews Alone (2015)

Teresa reviews Alone (2007), a Thai movie based on “Elephants Can Remember” that was turned into a psychological horror with conjoined twins.

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 2 stranglers

One twin assumes the identity of the other, recovered memories, and a dog. Two dogs. But more on them later.

Quality of movie: 4 stranglers

We were mesmerized despite the crappy film quality. If you don’t know what’s coming, you will be surprised. Horrified, too, but more on that later.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

Before we begin, a warning: This is a horror movie and it has horrifying moments. Two beagles are murdered, one onscreen, along with a pet white mouse. And some people, of course, but that’s not nearly as triggering.

I can no longer find the site that claimed Alone or Twin was a loose remake of Elephants Can Remember (1972). I can see why this claim was made. The heart of Elephants is the closeness between twin sisters, curdled by jealousy, envy, resentment, and mental illness into murder. Why should my twin be happy with a boy if I can’t have the same boy?

Make the twins conjoined, and you get an even closer relationship between the sisters because they can never be apart. They are always together. If a boy speaks to one twin, the other hears every word, sees every smile, can feel the pulse of blood quicken as that handsome sweet boy leans closer to his chosen girl. The other girl. Not you. Your twin sister. It can’t be avoided.

About the only privacy each sister has is mental. Or when they’re asleep, assuming dreams don’t leach between their sleeping brains right next to each other on the pillow.

For the twins to lead lives of their own, they must be surgically separated; a fraught and difficult medical procedure that both must agree to.

That relationship between an amped-up Margaret Ravenscroft, her twin Dorothea, and Margaret’s husband, Alistair, is what you see here. Remove Margaret’s daughter, Ceilia Ravenscroft, Poirot, Ariadne Oliver, along with everyone else and examine what leads one twin to murder the other and assume her life.

The story also throws in a supernatural element, something Agatha used often. She use them in two ways. In her novels, ghosts and other paranormal entities are tools of deception. The murderer indulges in parlor tricks to conceal his crimes and sway the minds of gullible witnesses.

It’s another matter in her short stories. Frequently, the supernatural is very real. A ghost comes back to warn, to haunt, to punish.

And thus we arrive at our sole Thai entry in the canon of international adaptations. It uses conjoined twins to replace Agatha’s more normal twin sisters. Insert your Siamese twin jokes now, but you won’t laugh after seeing this film. It was so successful that it’s been remade five times: four Indian versions (each in a different language) and a Filipino version.

We open at Pim’s surprise birthday party. She’s living in Korea, having left behind her tragic upbringing in Thailand. She’s also married to Wee, who’s diabetic, an important plot point, so expect to see needles in use.

At the party, a card reader tells Pim’s fortune. She’ll find something, or someone, she lost. Soon after, she learns her mother back in Thailand suffered a stroke. Reluctantly, she must return home.

Once in Thailand, in her mother’s home near the beach, she experiences frightening visions. The past never stays buried and might be one reason why the servant, Noi, refuses to stay the night in the home. Pim relives via flashback growing up with Ploy, her conjoined twin. They swore they’d never be parted, and they did everything together. They didn’t always agree and don’t have the same character. It’s Ploy who throws the rock at a child who teases them, not Pim. She’s more easy-going. Or more easily bullied.

Then, around 16 or so, they meet Wee in the hospital. He’s sensitive, an artist, and when Pim smiles at him, he loses his heart. He spends time with them, draws their picture, and gradually falls in love with Pim. Not Ploy.

In the present day, we understand that at some point the girls had been separated, and Ploy died, leaving Pim alone. It’s implied she died during the operation, and Pim feels guilty because she wanted to be independent. We watch her being haunted more and more by a malevolent ghost who won’t leave her alone. Meanwhile, her mother is dying in the hospital, unable to speak.

Wee, deeply concerned over Pim’s mental health, wants her to see his friend, now a shrink. Pim refuses until at the climax of a furious argument, she back over their dog, Lucky. He came to Thailand with them, and he sensed the ghost too, just like she does. He’s growling at something!

Pim sinks deeper into madness and paranoia and gradually, the awful truth is revealed to Wee and to us.

That’s not Pim. It’s her sister. The girl Wee loved and married was never Pim. He married Ploy, who stole her sister’s identity after her sister’s death to get the boy they both wanted. Ploy wears the necklace Wee gave Pim. Pim’s death gave Ploy her chance and she took it.

Remember when Ploy threw the rock to hurt a child? We see Ploy losing her temper in those flashbacks. She tears up the picture that Wee drew of Pim alone. She strangles a mouse in her bare hand because she’s so angry. She is the reason the sisters were separated. It may not have been a shoutout to Agatha’s story “The Fourth Man” (1925) where Félicie strangles Annette whose spirit possessed her body, but it’s a similar idea. Only death can free them. Ploy strangles Pim and then they must be separated, the living twin from the dead one.

Wee learns this when Pim and Ploy’s dying mother speaks to him, before Ploy murders her in her hospital bed.

He confronts her with the truth at the house and announces he’s leaving her. Ploy decides if she can’t have Wee, no one can, especially her vengeful ghost sister. She kidnaps him, ties him to a chair, tries to kill him, kills the replacement beagle that he didn’t appreciate enough, gets the unlucky servant too, and burns the house down around them.

But Pim is there all along. She never stopped loving Wee, although she couldn’t reach them in Korea. She had to wait until they returned to Thailand. The vengeful ghost gets her revenge on the twin sister who stole her life and her love from her. Wee escapes, scarred forever but alive. Ploy is trapped by her dead sister in the burning house and they die together, never to be separated again.

It’s scary, atmospheric, involving, and far more gothic than anything Agatha wrote. Or is it? Remember her novels: Anyone can be the victim and anyone can be the killer. In Elephants, Dorothea murdered her twin, Margaret, because of jealousy. Alistair wanted the sane sister, not her crazy twin, but eventually, the crazy twin got him anyway, killing her sister to do it.

If that’s not Agatha Christie, what is?

So give Alone a try. It’s not faithful to the text, but it’s faithful to the spirit of the novel. It’s all about wanting what you can’t have and murdering the person you love most in the world to get it.