Review of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) by Stephane C — 12 Oct 2010

Frankly, dear reader, there are more things in this film than are dreamt of in our philosophy... Though it draws the majority of its effects from the natural world - shooting at a particular hour of the day or night, staring intently at tangled vines or enigmatic rock formations - "Uncle Boonmee.

.." is a rare arthouse movie to deserve plaudits for its make-up and design: the cowled, jet-black, red-eyed monkey ghosts are the spookiest creations to have been observed on screen for many a year - and oddly credible in their behaviour, too, distinct from the Wolf Men/Chewbacca clones you half-expect them to be, and in fact (like the film itself) probably only one quantum leap or two away from the apes of "2001: A Space Odyssey".

Yet Weerasethakul has branched out (the forest floor imagery is deliberate) into video installation art in the past few years, and he's grown exquisitely attuned to the elements of light, climate and time, his camera able now to suggest whole worlds and dimensions both within and beyond a crop of jungle foliage or a placid rockpool.

Throughout "Uncle Boonmee...", there is the thrilling sense of a filmmaker striving to put real, appreciable art back into the cinema, which may explain why that Palme d'Or sits so comfortably upon its shoulders.

Yet it can also be approached and interpreted as so much more besides: a ghost story, a love story, a fairytale for grown-ups; a more honestly Buddhist film than Gaspar Noe's showy and self-involved "Enter the Void"; and in itself a statement of eye-opening faith in the power of the moving image as projected onto a blank wall.

It is, finally, an event: a communion, a transformation, a gorgeous, glorious transmigration of souls. If you still believe in, or have ever had cause to doubt, the cinema's capacity for magic and wonder, you need to see this.