Cemetery of Splendor (2015 Cannes review)

There’s no middle ground with Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films: You’re either on their poetic, dreamlike wavelength, or you’re not. In his finest movies (Syndromes and a Century, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives), the terror and beauty of the everyday gets transmuted into something mystical—his movies can be deliberate and realistic, and yet also quite fantastical, with no clear demarcation between the two plains. Some find Weerasethakul’s movies baffling, slow, tedious. But approach them in the right headspace, and they can be transformative.
His latest, Cemetery of Splendor, will require multiple viewings—just as all his films do—so that its thick fog of images, ideas and moods can be properly digested. But at this stage, it seems apparent that Weerasethakul has repeated some themes and some visual tricks from previous films. And it’s also clear that it doesn’t much matter: This emotional/philosophical terrain is his and his alone, and he’s still finding fresh ways to explore it.
As is often the case with Weerasethakul’s films, Cemetery of Splendor doesn’t have a plot so much as it has a catalogue of things that happen, or are at least imagined or dreamed. The film starts off straightforwardly enough: An elderly woman named Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas Widner) visits a clinic populated with comatose young soldiers. Inexplicably, they seem to have all been stricken by a sleeping sickness that leaves them bedridden. Jenjira starts caring for one particular soldier, Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), who never has anyone visit him. At the same time, she strikes up a friendship with a medium (Jarinpattra Rueangram) who helps concerned loved ones connect with the unconscious soldiers.
That’s a general idea of what gets Cemetery of Splendor going, but Weerasethakul soon has more mysterious plans in mind. In the writer-director’s earlier works, characters have turned into animals and the spirits of the dead have visited their living relatives. Playful but also transfixing, Weerasethakul’s movies give off a sense of freedom, that the rules of conventional narratives don’t apply. In Cemetery of Splendor, the odd wrinkles include the discovery that the clinic rests on the grounds of a former kingdom, which allows different eras of individuals to communicate at the same time. But because Weerasethakul always keeps his stories deceptively unadorned, the fantasy elements feel all the more uncanny, the commonplace suddenly being flecked with magic.