I went into this one not expecting a whole lot. The lead actress, Pla Komaratat, while being very easy on the eyes, had never acted in anything before and nothing since (thank goodness), according to IMDB. The lead actor, Lawrence De Stefano is relatively unknown, as is the rest of the cast. And just about the entire cast's acting chops, except for Gun Osathanugrah, who played the teenage son, and did a pretty darn good job of it, I might add, and Lawrence, whose acting was marginally sellable, was nothing to shake a stick at. Heck, the little girl, Nutchanun Mahingsa, was a more convincing actress than almost all of them.
The movie itself wasn't scary in the least, but it kept my attention throughout. Annoyingly, there were a lot of jumping around scenes from the past to the present to the past to the present, (especially toward the end), which could have been handled much differently to give the movie far better cohesiveness, and you especially want continuity during the third act! So the directing lacked seriously in that area. And there was this strange phone call at the beginning where some friend of Lawrence's character was asking about needing a place to stay when he came out to Bangkok for a period of time, and Lawrence offered him a home that a family member of his had owned and now belonged to him. The guy agreed, and then we never saw or heard from that guy again. If it was just to introduce the fact that he owned a house in Bangkok, that could have been presented in a much more distinct and superior manner. Doing it that way was just pure amateur script writing at its worst, and for the director to go through with it was pure amateur directing at its worst to boot!
The story was somewhat believable, but I don't know much about Thai tradition and beliefs concerning abortion, and this is not a spoiler, because there are red words on a black background discussing this on the screen in the first minute of the movie. So be that as it may, I cannot speak to it. As far as the twist, I saw it coming about a half hour before the end of the movie, and, man, I hate when that happens! Again, that's just poor direction. So, in the end, "The Attic" tried real hard with what little it had, and so did the actors. The director, Kaprice Kea, simply did not know what he was doing most of the time. Some of the shots were commendable, but most did not add to a sense of foreboding or suspense or horror, for that matter. And lastly, and this was very weird, the actual "attic" in the movie didn't look like it belonged to the house they were in at all. It was an extremely strange Spanish adobe looking structure, only accessible from a rooftop, and didn't resemble the ultra-modern makeup of the rest of the house in the least. I give "The Attic" (2017) 3/10.
