Thai filmmaker Pen-ek Ratanaruang is apparently a director of much acclaim in his homeland, but his work was completely unknown to me until I saw this trailer for his crime drama Headshot. Here’s a plot summary:
Tul (Nopachai Jayanama), a hitman, is shot in the head on a job. He wakes up after a three-month coma to find that he sees everything upside down, literally. Then he meets a girl that turns his world even more upside down. Who was trying to kill him in the first place?
It’s tough to judge a film like this from just its trailer, as there’s a very real chance that it could come off as gimmicky, but from the look of things, Headshot could well be the next big, taught, thriller crime movie. The unusual idea of having a guy who sees the world upside-down has some real potential to it, and if Pen-ek Ratanaruang is as good as people say he is, then Headshot will truly be something to behold. I wonder if it will have a similar bent to Memento, only in this case you have to stand on your head for the whole movie in order to figure out what’s really going on…
Headshot premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this year and has yet to secure a North American distributor.