If you liked Obsession, you'll love these Thai films

Obsession factor: She died. She came back. She's not letting anyone near her husband.

Based on one of Thailand’s most enduring ghost legends, Nang Nak follows Nak, a young wife who dies in childbirth while her husband Mak is away at war, then refuses to leave. She returns as a ghost and simply carries on with domestic life: cooking, nursing the baby and watching Mak sleep. The horror is not that she is terrifying. It's that she's devoted. Anyone who tries to tell Mak the truth ends up dead.

This is Obsession from Nikki's side of the nightmare: the loved one whose fate has been altered by forces beyond her control. Nak is not malevolent. She just cannot let go. That is what makes her so unsettling and so genuinely heartbreaking by the end.

Streaming: Netflix Thailand

Obsession factor: Same ghost wife, different tone – you laugh, then you don’t.

Banjong Pisanthanakun's blockbuster remake of the Nang Nak legend is the highest-grossing Thai film ever made and it got there by doing something genuinely strange: turning obsessive devotion as comedy. 

Mak brings his army buddies home to meet his wife. His friends realise she is dead before he does. He refuses to believe it. The film is funny – genuinely, absurdly funny – right up until it stops being funny and the weight of what Nak has been doing all this time begins to land.

Where Obsession is uncomfortable because love becomes control, Pee Mak is uncomfortable because love becomes wilful blindness. Mak does not want to know. That is its own kind of obsession.

Streaming: Netflix Thailand

Obsession factor: Two boys, one girl and one of them would rather see her dead than shared.

Set in a rural 1940s village during the Second World War, Krasue: Inhuman Kiss follows Sai, a teenage girl who inherits the curse of the krasue, a creature of Thai folklore whose head detaches from her body each night to hunt for blood. Sai is also caught between Jerd, who loves her possessively, and Noi, who loves her and tries to save her. The monster isn't really the point. The love triangle is.

What makes this Obsession is Jerd's arc: a character who joins the very mob hunting Sai, not out of fear but because if he cannot have her, he would rather see her destroyed. That specific flavour of devotion-turned-sabotage – familiar from Bear's wish and its consequences – is the film's real horror.

Streaming: Netflix Thailand

Obsession factor: He hated his father's obsessions, then he inherited every one of them.

Set in 1930s Bangkok, this two-part erotic drama follows Jan, a boy raised in a household ruled by his sadistic, libidinous stepfather. He is despised, unloved and surrounded by desire used as currency and control. When he comes of age, he does not escape the pattern. He repeats it. He becomes obsessed with the women in his life, particularly those he cannot quite possess, and slowly transforms into the man he despises.

Jan Dara is less about one obsession than an entire inheritance of it: desire as damage, passed down like a family curse. It is darker and slower than Obsession, and considerably more explicit, but the diagnosis is similar: wanting someone too much doesn't only hurt them. It ruins you.

Streaming: Netflix Thailand (Part 1); also available on Amazon Prime Video

Obsession factor: They said their love would last until the sky collapsed and the earth cracked. Then it did.

A young man falls into an affair with his uncle's wife, Yupadee. When the uncle discovers them, his revenge is almost sardonically perfect: he chains their wrists together and banishes them to a cabin in the woods. They wanted to be together forever, so now they are. What follows is a dissection of romantic obsession from the inside, as the two lovers, forced into literal proximity, begin to resent the very thing they swore they would die for.

This is the most formally beautiful film on the list. M.L. Pundhevanop Dhewakul’s 2010 adaptation won the top prize at the Deauville Asian Film Festival and it earns it. It does not ask whether love can become obsession. It asks what happens when obsession is granted exactly what it wants.

Streaming: Not currently available on major streaming platforms – seek it out on physical media or catch it at occasional cinema screenings around the city. We’ll update this page if screenings pop up.

Obsession factor: A wife so consumed by suspicion she can't tell what is real any more – and neither can you.

Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Cannes Directors' Fortnight selection is the quietest film on this list and possibly the most psychologically precise. A Thai couple, Wit and Dang, return to Bangkok after seven years in America for a funeral. They check into a hotel at 5am, jet-lagged and tense. Wit picks up a teenager named Ploy in the bar. He brings her upstairs to sleep on the sofa. Dang wakes up.

What unfolds over the next 24 hours, in a hotel room where dream and reality keep bleeding into each other, is about the obsessive quality of jealousy and how a marriage can become a prison built from suspicion. Dang dreams of smothering Ploy with a pillow. The film never quite tells you whether any of what follows actually happens. That ambiguity is the point.

Streaming: Not currently available on major streaming platforms – available to rent or purchase on select VOD services, or catch it at occasional cinema screenings around the city. We’ll update this page if screenings pop up.

Obsession factor: A father who couldn’t bury his dead daughter, so he tried to bring her back through his living one.

Ning and her husband Kwin rent out their Bangkok home to two women: a retired doctor and her daughter. Things go wrong quickly. But the real engine of Home for Rent is Kwin's backstory. A decade earlier, he lost a seven-year-old daughter from a previous relationship and the grief never healed. He has been secretly trying to bring her back and has been manipulated into offering his current daughter as a vessel.

Home for Rent is, at its core, a horror film about a man who cannot accept loss. His obsession is not love gone bad. It is  grief that refuses to end. The parallels to Bear and his One Wish Willow are almost embarrassingly direct: a desperate man, a supernatural shortcut and catastrophic consequences.

Streaming: Netflix Thailand

Obsession factor: One of them turned the experiment into a suicide mission. The other one turned it into an obsession.

Two young doctors – best friends, science devotees – witness a ghost at their hospital and decide to prove it. What begins as a spirited research project becomes, after a catastrophic midpoint turn, one of the most uncomfortable portraits of grief-fuelled obsession in recent Thai cinema. Wee's fixation grows so consuming that he harms himself, endangers others and loses sight of what he was actually mourning in the first place.

Ghost Lab earns its place here not for its horror set-pieces but for what it says about the psychology of fixation: the way obsession masquerades as purpose, the way we dress up 'I cannot let go' as 'I need to know the truth'. Bear could relate.

Streaming: Netflix Thailand