a review of 能召回前世的布米叔叔

The editing choices in this were really interesting to me, because of how they totally dodge the ingrained impulses of Western genre film. When Boonmee's wife materializes at dinner, it's in the middle of a long sustained cover shot of Boonmee/Jen/Tong sitting at the dinner table. There's no music cue or sudden change of angle on the appearance; she simply appears bit by bit, fading into view as though she'd always been there. Nothing in the direction calls attention to it besides the reactions of the characters. Which makes sense: She's not a horror ghost that jumps out at you, but a comforting spirit. Once she's become fully opaque, Weerasethakul does another curious thing: He immediately cuts away from the cover shot and focuses just on Boonmee, with Jen and Tong on either side. As Boonmee speaks to her, we hear only her voice from offscreen for a long chunk of the conversation. IIRC, she doesn't appear back in frame until Jen pulls out the family photos to show her. It's as though the movie doesn't care that she's a ghost, and is treating her exactly like any other character. Which makes it even stranger when moments later, the film indulges in a little bit of old-fashioned horror imagery with the son's appearance, having him float out of the shadows in his red-eyed ape guise. (Apparently the monkey spirits are creatures that show up in Thai monster movies, so their usage here can be seen as a pop culture homage to the cinema of Weerasethakul's youth) But the movie immediately cuts the tension by having the family calmly invite him to sit at the table, undercutting the initial terror by turning it into something a bit silly and a bit sad. All sorts of things happen in this movie that could be easily played for shocking effect through genre cliche, but Weerasethakul uses the larger language of cinema to make them all seem like just another part of normal life.