Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives Review

Apichatpong Weerasethakul makes films that ask you to change the speed at which you watch, and this is the one that persuaded a Cannes jury to come along. A dying man in rural Isan receives visitors on his veranda: his dead wife, translucent and calm, and his lost son, returned as a monkey spirit with glowing red eyes. Nobody in the scene is especially surprised, and that refusal of astonishment is the whole method. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom shoots the jungle at dusk in long static takes where the sound design does most of the work, insects and generators and moving water, until the forest reads as populated rather than empty.

A catfish and a disfigured princess occupy a digression that never gets explained. The final movement, in which people appear to split into two versions of themselves in a hotel room, is offered without comment. This will not reward a viewer looking for propulsion, and the performances are deliberately flat. But the ideas about reincarnation, memory and the violence done in the northeast are held so lightly that they stay, and the images belong to nobody else.