The Cutprice Guignol

Let’s be honest with ourselves: time travel stories are hard to get right (and I’m not just saying that because I hated the last season of Doctor Who so much).

Which is why I went into Thai horror-drama Don’t Come Home with such a skeptical eye – I mean, a haunted house story that gives way to a time travel plot that follows Varee (Woranuch Bhirombhakdi) as she flees to the home she grew up in with her mother Panida (Cindy Bishop) to save herself and her daughter from the abuse dealt out at the hands of her violent husband? With a procedural element tossed in on top as pregnant cop Fah (Pitchapa Phanthumchinda) tries to get to the bottom of a missing persons’ case that revolves around Varee’s daughter Min? And also there’s a ghost? That’s a lot. That’s a lot of a lot. That’s too much, probably.

And, look, to be quite honest, I don’t think that all the time travel stuff in Don’t Come Home entirely hangs together. By the time the show wrapped up, I still found myself with a few questions – mostly, wait, did that woman get pregnant with herself by her own father? As is the bane of time travel fiction, pulling all the pieces together in a way that’s both engaging, satisfying, and doesn’t involve someone standing in front of a whiteboard giving a lecture on the exact physics of a bootstrap paradox.

But I have to be real with you: I don’t actually care that much. Because what the show does get right is the emotional core, and I’m willing to forgive a lot if a story can pull out a series of character studies as compelling as this. Don’t Come Home, broadly, is a story about motherhood, loss, and grief, and what the overlap of those messy emotions can lead to in this strange speculative world. The haunted house and ghostly aspects which dominate much of its marketing are more a metaphor for the way that family and trauma haunts us, the emotional resonance it leaves behind, and it uses time travel not as some hard sci-fi proof of concept but as a lens through which to interrogate the complexity of mother-daughter (and daughter-mother) relationships. Especially when the women involved in them are willing to go to unthinkable lengths to fill the hole of what they have lost.

And those lengths are completely fascinating to me. Don’t Come Home embraces a moral greyness within its characters, and especially in Panida: after the loss of her daughter, and the guilt that she carries for the emotional neglect that she subjected her to, when she’s offered a chance to fill that gap in her life, she takes it. It’s a selfish choice, a desperate one, an entirely unfair and self-centred one – but it’s one that makes total sense within the context of the show, one you can’t even entirely hold against her. There’s little more compelling to me than a character making a terrible, horrible choice for reasons you can completely understand and even empathize with, and it’s that moral greyness that makes Don’t Come Home such a hit for me.

If you’re approaching Don’t Come Home looking for some dense and immaculate sci-fi story, you’re probably not going to find it. But what you will find is a dense, compelling, and morally complex story about generations of women drawn irrevocably back to a single place and point in time where their lives both diverge and come together. I know it’s been a bit of a divisive release, so I’d love to hear what you think of it in the comments – love it? Hate it? Still trying to figure out how it all works? Let me know below!

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(header image via Soap Central)