THE LAKE
(บึง/กาฬ)
dir. Lee Thongkham, 2022
105 mins. Thailand.
In Thai with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21 – 5 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 30 – 7:30 PM followed by discussion with filmmaker Lee Thongkham!
(This event is $10.)

As part of our annual Halloween programming, Spectacle is thrilled to offer a limited engagement of Lee Thongkam’s giant kaiju thriller THE LAKE (never before shown on the big screen in New York City.)

A young girl finds an egg near a lake in Bueng Kan (“black marsh”), near the northernmost part of Thailand facing the Mekong River. Not long after she’s brought the egg back to her home village, an amphibious monster over thirty feet tall emerges, terrorizing the town in search of its young. Designed by SFX maestro Jordu Schell (of NEMESIS, STARSHIP TROOPERS, Tim Burton’s PLANET OF THE APES, CLOVERFIELD and many many others), this monster is a triumph of combined practical and computer-generated effects, hulking and menacing like a shapeshifting mutant dinosaur. Cut off from the rest of the outside world, the residents of Bueng Kan must band together to stop the carnage before it’s too late.

Visceral, moody and drenched in darkness, THE LAKE foregoes the slow-burn exposition of more traditional monster movies. It’s a kaiju lover’s feast of a film, equally indebted to Godzilla and Gamera as to Spielberg’s original JURASSIC PARK. In an interview with PopHorror, director Lee Thongkam emphasized THE LAKE as a loving homage to the creature feature as well as “a story about religion, the human spirit, and science… But most importantly, it’s about finding one another through the chaos that one does not understand.”