Bangkok-based filmmaker and moving image artist Taiki Sakpisit’s practice explores the underlying tensions, conflicts, and the sense of anticipation, in contemporary Thailand. The Spirit Level 2023 meditates on the political conflicts, trauma, and violence in the troubled country, reflected through the artist’s road trips across the north- eastern region along the Mekong River. The film begins with a downstream river that descends from Than Thong waterfall and flows into the Mekong River. It explores the mythic underground cave that, according to legends, is a subterranean kingdom where the divine Naga resides in the netherworld. At the heart of The Spirit Level is a frantic sequence of a spirit medium in the midst of possession. This epileptic episode emulates the optic feedback eliciting the trancelike revenant images as the spirited entity registers the medium’s body. Gradually, the hallucinatory double images are disrupted by a freeze frame. This suspension of time occurs to commemorate the dislocated spirits of three anti-government activists, two of whose mutilated bodies were found in the Mekong River in December 2018. The three men had been in exile since the 2014 coup d’état, until they were kidnapped by an officially sanctioned death squad. It is one of countless forced disappearances and assassinations of political dissidents by the state since the 1970s which are still ongoing and unresolved.