Apichatpong Weerasethakul now seems intent on expanding his career outside of his native Thailand with his first foreign film, this one set in Colombia and uses a mixture of both Spanish and English. His film before this was so cryptic that it was hard to even tell what is going on. This new one may leave you questioning the intent behind his choices but the overall plot is actually rather straightforward to follow. Towards the end there is a twist totally unlike anything the director has done before which I’m not sure I like but all directors must innovate I suppose. But overall this is another masterful work that reaffirms the director as being among the best working today.
Jessica, who seems to be Scottish but currently lives in Colombia, is awakened at night by a loud thudding kind of sound that no one else seems to be able to hear. Next we see her visiting her sister in hospital for is sick for some mysterious reason. Her sister suspects that she might be cursed by a dog that she has mistreated. In the hospital she meets a researcher who is excavating the remains of people from thousands of years ago from under a tunnel construction project. Meanwhile Jessica hears the strange sound often enough that she has difficulty sleeping. She goes to a sound engineer Hernán who helps her recreate the sound to save as a file but they get no closer to identifying what it is. But then when she goes to find him again later, the other people in the building tell her that no such person exists. Similarly there are some unexplained inconsistences between her own memories and what her sister recalls when she gets out of the hospital.
Though divorced from a Thailand setting, this film retains much of the same mysticism and aura of the director’s previous work. It probably helps that Colombia as a setting is similarly not a fully developed country and the film draws on a sense of connection to the natives and the deep jungle. The cinematography as always is perfect and particular attention is paid this time around on the soundscape. The film is content to rest for long moments with nothing moving on the screen so you’re forced to strain your ears to hear for the slightest sounds. Tilda Swinton excels in the role as someone who is not herself a Colombian and so is still feeling her way around. There are callbacks and references aplenty such as when Jessica encounters a dog in the street and it seems to follow her around for a while, recalling her earlier conversation with her sister. When she loses Hernán, soon enough she meets an older man also with the same name in the countryside who seems to share an instant connection with her. Even as you struggle to make sense of the events according to some conventional narrative, the lyrical power of the film as a sensory experience is undeniable.
As for the film’s meaning, I’m not sure that there is or needs to be more than the director’s usual predilection for reminding us that the world is more than the mundane and the material. The film is infused with spirituality throughout and the strange sound is both mysteriously and yet frustratingly close to something that can be identified. It is fascinating to watch the sound engineer manipulate audio files to achieve something close to what Jessica hears. Yet that process of trying to figure the sound out rationally doesn’t do a thing for her. By contrast it is when she meets the other version of Hernán who talks to her about his connection to the Earth that she is somehow able to connect to his memories and that in turn reveals the truth of the sound to her. Personally I would interpret the actual explanation, which Apichatpong surprisingly offers in an explicit and plain manner, as a kind of homage to other directors who like to insert similar shots in their own films out of nowhere. But I don’t believe that the specific explanation itself actually matters. I guess that it does make a difference in that being aware of more than the mundane, ordinary world doesn’t necessarily need to involve ghosts and spirits.
Anyway I obviously liked this much more than some of the director’s other works that I can barely understand. It’s also notable that he successfully makes a film that feels naturally at home in Colombia by but having the main character being someone who is not herself Colombian, he doesn’t try to assert any special knowledge or personal connection to the country. You can see how he pushes back against claims that he is a cultural ambassador for Thailand. His work is simply too unique and personal to represent anyone other than himself but that of course makes him one of the most fascinating directors currently working.