{"id":79659,"date":"2026-05-26T09:23:44","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T01:23:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=79659"},"modified":"2026-05-26T09:23:44","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T01:23:44","slug":"mother-bhumi-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=79659","title":{"rendered":"Mother Bhumi (2025)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I’ve watched two of Chong Keat Aun’s films so far and loved both. This was enough to make me consider me the best Malaysian director at the moment. Unfortunately despite Mother Bhumi<\/em> being a higher profile work starring international star Fan Bingbing, it counts as striking out for me. His technical skills have improved I’d admit and it’s astonishing how he is able to wring such authentic acting out of an actor who is definitely not Malaysian. But the message he conveys here is both off-putting as it sidesteps serious political issues and worrying as the director gives you the impression that he truly does believe in black magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

In Kedah near the border with Thailand, Hong Im is a member the Thai Chinese community whose history dates from when the area was part of Siam. A single mother with a son Boon and a daughter Koon, she appears to make a living both by being a farmer and as a traditional healer for her community, performing rituals to ward off black magic. Early on, when a woman is killed in a car accident near her house, she is able to see the dead woman’s ghost and comfort her. In her spare time, she does her best to help the members of her community resist having their land seized by Malays who claim the land is theirs. She is friends with a local politician and frequently entreats him to help. Meanwhile Boon expresses interest in the rituals she performs and so she starts training him to succeed her. But Koon’s relationship with her is poor as the daughter disdains that part of her heritage and prefers to hew closer to a Malaysian identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The early scenes are reminiscent of the director’s first film The Story of Southern Islet<\/a><\/em>, with its matter of fact treatment of the supernatural. In fact, his technical skills have visibly improved since then with excellent camera placement and fantastic control of the light. It’s downright astonishing that he is able to get Fan Bingbing to pass as authentically Malaysian, down to the mix of Hokkien, Malay and English accents that are found only here. Most of all, the subject matter about land tussles between Thai-Chinese and Malaysian-Malays is niche but it’s extremely courageous of him to even raise the issue. It shows how the government employ legal machinery to evict the Thai-Chinese from their farmland and hand it over to Malays who they claim are the original and rightful landowners. This is probably one of the very few instances in Malaysian media which dares to highlight how poisonous the very concept of bumiputera<\/em> is, that some are considered sons of the soil and others are not. The spooky scenes in which the ghosts of Chinese ancestors in their traditional dress are revealed to be alongside the living all along, seen only by the spiritually aware, are a powerful statement that other peoples too have lived and died on that land for over a hundred years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it’s doubly disappointing that Chong sidesteps the political and socio-economic sides of these issues to focus exclusively on the supernatural. The director leaves no room for ambiguity here. Magic is real and it was what killed Hong Im’s husband who too was an activist fighting for the local community. In fact, when the Dato’ Hong needs help from loses his position due to the political upheaval of the 1990s, the man’s wife comes to her seeking help as she suspects black magic is involved. The final third or so of the film practically devolves into an old-fashioned horror film as she discovers that all of her problems stem from an enemy bomoh. It’s flabbergasting what a terrible turn of events this is as it instantly takes this into unserious film territory. Suddenly the socioeconomic context and the political struggles no longer matter. The critical choice that Im’s two children must make between rival identities is put aside. When an actual black magician is running around stealing souls and killing people, you’d better believe that’s a more urgent crisis to resolve but it’s so dumb and uninteresting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the question is why indeed did Chong choose to do it this way. The more charitable view might be that this was the only way that he could get it made. An overtly political film that accuses the Malay establishment of perpetuating a systematic policy of oppressing minorities to seize their land would likely be banned from the get-go. By framing this as a supernatural horror film, he did manage to persuade the Malaysian government actually support it. A more distressing one is that Chong genuinely believes in black magic, hence the decision not to employ it as a metaphor but as a literal force in people’s lives. Whatever the reasons, this decision completely ruins what should be a very promising premise, throwing out all that is insightful and artistic in favor B-movie schlock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve watched two of Chong Keat Aun’s films so far and loved both. This was enough to make me consider me the best Malaysian director at the moment. Unfortunately despite Mother Bhumi being a higher profile work starring international star Fan Bingbing, it counts as striking out for me. His technical skills have improved I’d … Continue reading Mother Bhumi (2025)<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=79659"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79805,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79659\/revisions\/79805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=79659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=79659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=79659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}