Watching Netflix’s 2025 Thai horror film “Tomb Watcher” left me with an unsettling realization: I was rooting for the ghost. In a genre where we typically sympathize with the living protagonists trying to escape supernatural torment, director Vathanyu Ingkawiwat has crafted something far more morally complex—a revenge tale where the avenging spirit is unequivocally the victim, and our supposed “heroes” are actually the villains of their own story.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Our “Protagonists”
The film follows Cheev and his mistress Rossukhon (Ros) as they must spend 100 days with his deceased wife Lunthom’s preserved corpse to claim her inheritance. On the surface, this setup promises a typical haunted house horror where two lovers are terrorized by a jealous ghost. But the deeper I dug into their story, the more disturbed I became—not by Lunthom’s vengeful spirit, but by the callous cruelty of the living.
Cheev isn’t just an unfaithful husband; he’s a calculating murderer who let his wife die to claim her wealth. When Lunthom discovered his affair and threatened divorce, she suffered a breathing attack—likely triggered by her cigarette smoke allergy combined with the emotional trauma of confronting her husband’s betrayal. As she gasped for air and begged for help, Cheev made a cold calculation: if she lived, he’d lose everything in the divorce. If she died, he’d inherit it all. So he stood there and watched her die.
This isn’t a crime of passion or a moment of weakness—it’s premeditated murder by omission. Cheev actively chose his wife’s death over his own financial loss, then had the audacity to play the grieving widower while immediately moving his mistress into their shared home.
The Mistress’s Moral Blindness
Ros presents a more complex case, but her moral failings are equally troubling. While she didn’t directly cause Lunthom’s death, her response to learning the truth reveals a disturbing lack of empathy. When Cheev confesses that he let Lunthom die specifically to be with her, Ros initially reacts with horror—but then returns to comfort him, telling him not to feel guilty because “it was for the better.”
This moment crystallized why I found myself sympathizing with the ghost over the living. Ros doesn’t see Lunthom as a human being who was murdered; she sees her as an obstacle that was conveniently removed. Her decision to stay and claim the blood money makes her complicit in both the original murder and the ongoing desecration of Lunthom’s memory.
Lunthom: The True Victim Seeking Justice
In contrast, Lunthom emerges as a genuinely sympathetic figure whose “haunting” feels more like justice than malevolence. She was a wealthy woman who tried desperately to save her marriage, even buying a remote cottage where she and Cheev could reconnect. When she discovered his affair, she offered him a clean divorce rather than seeking revenge. Her only “crime” was trusting her husband and believing in their vows.
Her supernatural revenge, while horrific in its execution, follows a twisted logic of poetic justice. She traps Cheev in the glass casket beside her decomposing corpse—forcing him to literally live up to his marriage vows of “till death do us part.” She places Ros beneath them, ensuring the mistress will always be exactly where Lunthom saw her: beneath her marriage, feeding off the decay of what Cheev destroyed.
The Intentional Moral Inversion
I believe this moral complexity is entirely intentional. Ingkawiwat has crafted what critic reviews have noted contains elements of “good for her” horror—a subgenre where the supposed “monster” is actually the righteous party seeking justified revenge. Films like “The Invisible Man” (2020) or classics like “Carrie” have explored similar themes, but “Tomb Watcher” takes it further by making the victims so thoroughly unsympathetic.
The film’s Thai cultural context adds another layer. Lunthom’s will requiring 100 days of mourning reflects traditional Thai beliefs about honoring the dead and the spiritual importance of proper funeral rites. Cheev’s immediate violation of these customs—bringing his mistress to the death house, treating the corpse as an inconvenience—represents not just personal betrayal but cultural sacrilege.
Why We Root for the Ghost
The brilliance of “Tomb Watcher” lies in how it gradually strips away any reason to sympathize with Cheev and Ros. Initially, we might feel sorry for them—trapped in a creepy house with a corpse, haunted by supernatural forces. But as their true natures emerge, our sympathy evaporates.
Cheev reveals himself as a man so selfish he’d rather commit murder than face financial hardship. Ros shows herself to be someone who can rationalize benefiting from that murder as long as she doesn’t have to think too hard about it. Meanwhile, Lunthom’s “haunting” begins to feel less like supernatural terror and more like a justice system finally working correctly.
The Horror of Moral Rot
The real horror in “Tomb Watcher” isn’t supernatural—it’s moral. It’s the chilling realization that two people can be so consumed by greed and selfishness that they’ll casually step over a corpse to claim their prize. The ghost’s revenge is horrifying in its brutality, but it’s also satisfying in its appropriateness.
When the film ends with Cheev trapped forever beside his victim’s rotting corpse while Ros lies beneath them, drinking the fluid of decay, it feels less like a horror movie conclusion and more like a parable about the wages of sin. They chose to build their happiness on Lunthom’s death; now they’ll spend eternity drowning in the consequences of that choice.
A New Kind of Horror
“Tomb Watcher” represents something relatively rare in horror cinema: a film that forces us to examine our assumptions about who deserves sympathy and who deserves punishment. By making the ghost the moral center of the story, it challenges the genre’s typical dynamics and creates a more psychologically complex experience.
The film doesn’t ask us to forgive Lunthom’s supernatural brutality—it asks us to understand it. In a world where justice failed her in life, supernatural revenge becomes her only recourse. And watching two murderers get their comeuppance, even through ghostly intervention, feels less like horror and more like restoration of moral order.
In the end, “Tomb Watcher” succeeds because it recognizes a fundamental truth: sometimes the dead have more humanity than the living, and sometimes the monster is the only one seeking justice. The real tomb being watched isn’t Lunthom’s—it’s the moral grave that Cheev and Ros dug for themselves the moment they chose murder and complicity over conscience and compassion.
That’s what makes this film truly unsettling—not its supernatural elements, but its unflinching portrayal of how easily we can lose our humanity in pursuit of what we want. In trying to escape their moral tomb, Cheev and Ros only dug themselves deeper into it.
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