Every dusk, a drowned teacher calls the names of the villagers who heard her die and did nothing. Those who answer drown on dry land. The young cop who shelved her complaint is the only one she never calls: he wasn’t at the pit that night. He alone could tell the truth and live. But the truth would bury his father.
If the truth would ruin the people you love, would you still speak?
There is a Thai idiom, น้ำท่วมปาก — “a flood in the mouth”: when you know, but cannot say. This year, the water came for real.
- Sales agent
- Co-producers
- Directors
- Eakasit Thairaat & Chieng Taveepon
- Producers
- Anyarat Pipat
- Genre
- Supernatural Horror
- Language
- Thai
- Setting
- A floodplain sub-district in Thailand’s industrial east
- Country
- Thailand
- Runtime
- ~100 min
- Budget
- Under USD 1M
- Status
- In Development
Meeting at AFM 2026 · November 10–15, 2026 · Fairmont Century Plaza, Los Angeles
Three rules. No one explains them.
- At dusk, she calls the names of those who heard her that night. Answer — even “who’s there?” — and you drown standing up.
- She lives in any water that touches the pit. When she calls you, your reflection vanishes — and she stands where it was.
- Only the truth can seal her: her name, and how she really died. Every seal has a price.
Last year, someone wrote “fell in the water.”
I · The voice everyone knows
A flood cracks an old clay seal. At dusk, villagers drown on dry land and the whole sub-district falls silent. Corporal Phum — a village cop whose father is grooming him for local office — finds an entry in the station log, in his own handwriting, from a year ago.
II · Every door she knocked on
Phum retraces a young teacher’s last weeks: the council, the health office, the press, his own police counter. Everyone took her complaint. No one came. Then her phone surfaces: everyone at the pit heard her that night, including his father. Phum never came.
III · The answer
Sealing the truth in secret would end the haunting and save the land deal — but every seal has a price, and this one is a child’s life. The night before the buyers inspect the pit, Phum must choose: the truth he has uncovered, or the silence that protects his father and his own future.
Phum, 30
His father bought him his badge. He believes in the right things. He has never once done them.
Kaew, 29
A daycare teacher who didn’t care about politics. She cared about the rash on a child’s arm.
Chan, 58
Phum’s father. He rows out to save your grandmother from the flood. He is also the reason the water is black.
Mor Saneh, 65
A ritual specialist who seals spirits in clay pots under water. Thirty years for the powerful, never asking who they were.
Beum, 45
The kindest cop at the station. The night she died, he checked the pit and radioed back: “Nothing found.”
Casting in progress.
- “Who’s there?”
- A man answers a voice in knee-deep water and drowns standing up.
- The holy water bowl
- At a funeral, every reflection in the bowl turns into her. Except Phum’s.
- “Copy.”
- A woman’s voice calls Beum’s call sign. He answers out of habit and drowns on the roof of his patrol truck.
- The blackout
- At dusk the whole village goes dark and silent. Only the factory stays lit.
- The glass of water
- She calls the father’s name from the glass he just poured. He doesn’t even look down.
Low-cost horror: sound, silence and reflections, with minimal visual effects.
A village selling its land to the company that poisoned it.
Kok Sa is a fictional sub-district on a floodplain in Thailand’s industrial east. A “For Sale” sign stands in front of every house: the waste company’s parent company wants the whole sub-district for a recycling zone. Beside the signs hang campaign posters with Phum’s face, printed before he ever agreed to run.
Everyone needs the deal. Everyone heard her.
Dusk is the film’s hour.
Violet-orange light against a rainbow sheen on black water, with frames about 75% in shadow. Torchlight is the truth people make; light that glows on its own is her.
The radio is the film’s voice.
Static, call signs, a woman’s voice cutting in. “Copy. Checked. Nothing found.” is the film’s first lie; its last sound is a call answered honestly.
Every reflection is a question.
In every shot of still water, the audience checks the characters’ reflections. Phum’s stays his own, and that is the most frightening thing in the film.
The water really turned rainbow.
- 2026
- Floodwater in Prachinburi, an industrial province east of Bangkok, carries a rainbow film past three villages from the direction of a waste landfill. Officials sample four sites.
- 2018–21
- After China bans waste imports in 2018, Thailand takes in 1.1 million tonnes of plastic scrap.
- 2025–26
- Raids in the same province find 8,000 tonnes of e-waste at a single foreign-owned factory, and an illegal e-waste plant hidden inside a national forest reserve.
Your old phone might be in her grave.
Sources: Thai PBS, Prachatai (Sep–Oct 2026) · The Thaiger · The Nation (Jun 2025) · Khaosod English (Aug 2026). The film’s names are fictional.
- 2019 · Jayro Bustamante
- La Llorona — A ghost returns as testimony against the powerful.
- 2002 · Hideo Nakata
- Dark Water — Water as the ghost’s medium; dread from everyday places.
- 2021 · Banjong Pisanthanakun
- The Medium — Thai folk belief with grounded realism.
- Budget
- Under USD 1M
- Locations
- Five: the pit, a flooded village, the police station, a daycare centre, the headman’s house
- Water work
- One to two tank days, with dry-for-wet
- Reflections
- Controlled 2D compositing
- Status
- Treatment complete · screenplay in development
- Shoot
- Thailand · dates to be confirmed
- Production
- Superfine Film, a film coordinator licensed by the Thailand Film Office
Eakasit Thairaat
Writer-director of HALABALA (2025, BrandThink Cinema), sold to some 20 territories. Wrote 13: GAME OF DEATH (2006), remade in Hollywood as 13 SINS, and co-wrote the hit anthology 4BIA. Asian Television Award for Best Screenplay for THE COLLECTOR (2019).
Chieng Taveepon
Founder and CEO of Superfine Film. Twenty years directing commercials across Asia (Haribo, Grab, Alibaba), awarded at Citra Pariwara, Adman and MC2. His feature SCENT OF SILENCE is in development for 2027.
Concept visuals — not final photography.