Dearest Sister (2016)

Nok packs her sparse belongings, and after an argument with her fiancé, she boards an overnight bus out of her rural village for the Lao capital of Vientiane. She’s never seen so many people, so much traffic and activity. She’s met at the station by Jakob, the Estonian husband of her distant cousin Ana, who only breaks from an overseas phone call discussing his NGO’s legal problems long enough to confirm that the girl speaks no English. Nok tentatively climbs into the back seat of Jakob’s SUV.

Jakob settles Nok into the guest room of an expansive Western home, and in the morning he departs for work in the villages leaving Nok alone in the house with Ana, who is steadily losing her eyesight to an unidentifiable medical condition, and a pair of low caste servants who tend to the house and the garden. Nok has heard rumors that Ana is harming herself, possibly in response to her uneasy multicultural marriage.

As the girls grow closer, Nok learns that in the corners of Ana’s degenerating vision, terrifying phantoms are desperately lashing out at Ana. The encounters leave Ana bleeding and bruised, muttering cryptic messages composed of random number sequences that, as Nok soon discovers, predict winning lottery numbers.

For the first time in her life, Nok suddenly has access to independent income, as long as she is able to maintain her cousin’s ghastly connection to the afterlife. Income that Nok immediately wastes on new clothes and urban living, while her family and straying fiancé wait in the village for her to send money home.

As Nok ascends in social status, her innocence fades. She develops an apathetic disregard for her cousin’s plight beyond the blind girl’s ability to generate lottery winnings, and begins to lord over the increasingly resentful housekeeper and gardener who have their own suspicions that the country girl is stealing from her disabled cousin.
Nok’s increasing greed drives her from offering Ana sisterly comfort, to anticipating and encouraging the hauntings, to finally actively engineering circumstances that force Ana into dangerous confrontations with the dead.

When Jakob suddenly informs Ana that the couple must leave Laos due to mounting concerns over his criminal business practices, Nok must decide how far she’s willing to endanger Ana to extort one last big lottery win before Ana unceremoniously abandons the village girl to a life of rural poverty.