Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives Is An Utterly Unique And Transfixing Feature

I know it'll sound a pretentious descriptor on par with "It's really a tone poem" or "The city is a character unto itself", but it does feel appropriate for me to note that Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives feels more like a dream mixed with a fairy tale than it does a traditional piece of cinema. Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2010 motion picture heavily utilizes the more abstract and fantastical nature that most dreams and fairy tales have with aplomb to create something thoroughly unpredictable (one can never tell just what heightened imagery the next scene might bring) as well as something emotionally powerful on an intimate level too, which, come to think of it, is where many particularly memorable fairy tales and even dreams tend to resonate.


Now who is this Uncle Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) of the title? Well, he is a man growing up in modern-day Thailand who is dying of kidney failure. With the help of his sister-in-law Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) and nephew Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), he is able to maintain his farm and keep his workers employed, but he can tell his time on this Earth is drawing to a close as he grows sicker and sicker as the days go on. Soon he will join his wife and son in the afterlife, a prospect that does bring some cheer to him in times of great pain and strife. He won't have to wait until death to see his loved ones though, as the two appear at his dinner table (Jen and Tong are also present) one fateful night.

There's Uncle Boonmee's wife, Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwong), looking just as young as the day she died! She is now coming to her widowed lover as a ghost and she isn't the only long missing loved one of Uncle Boonmee's to return on this fateful evening. In fact, Boonmee's son, Boonsong (Jeerasak Kulhong), has also returned, though he has come back in the form of a gorilla monster that he had been obsessed with finding and capturing back when he was human. Though their appearances are unexpected, Boonmee is glad to see two people so close to his heart again, especially as he prepares for the inevitable process of leaving this mortal coil.

The dinnertime reunion scene basically establishes the sort of tone Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is working from. Heavily stylized details (like a gorilla monster or a ghost) are crucial parts of this scene, and while people at first react with surprise at their presence, they quickly accept them and soon treat them as just normal aspects of the environment. It's interesting to note, though, that the more heightened creatures in this scene are not accepted as mundane elements until they're treated like human beings, with Boonsong's first appearances (intentionally) being shot and edited like he's a horror movie villain, he's simply depicted as a nebulous unsettling being with no distinguishing characteristics to speak of beyond just those red glowing eyes of his peering out from the darkness.

There's an amazingly conveyed sense of dread in Boonsong's initial appearances as simply this non-defined creature, especially in that incredibly unsettling image of him just standing there in the shadows at the top of the staircase, those of eyes looking directly into the soul of the viewer. But then he clarifies that he is Boonsong and means no harm and we get to see the face, the eyes and hear of the tragic backstory of this character and suddenly a fully-formed individual takes the place of this horrifying monster. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is oh so adept at making the fantastical intimidating but Apichatpong Weerasethakul's screenplay is equally skilled at unraveling the humanity nestled inside these stylized creations.

Weerasethakul's script is also quite gifted at getting making Boonmee's plight with coping with his disease and the ever-growing presence of impending death in his life. Thanapat Saisaymar, in his only acting credit, does a remarkable job of executing a realistic depiction of the emotions a person goes through when they know for a fact that the end is near. He's able to convey much of these emotions in a subdued manner that fits with the more restrained aesthetic of certain sequences where dialogue is eschewed in favor of letting visuals captured in elongated single-takes say all that needs to be said. Since Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is very much a visual tour de force in terms of shot compositions and memorable imagery, this turns out to be a very smart move.

But whether scenes have dialogue or not, there's a haunting quality that permeates Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a facet of this motion picture that feels like it shouldn't work alongside the more over-the-top elements of its story, like a particularly persuasive catfish playing on the insecurities of a figure of royalty. But like so much in cinema, it all comes down to the execution and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives knows just how to use stylized facets of its story like nighttime gorilla monsters or ghosts to enhance the tragic qualities found in its various themes. There's an element of humanity, the kind I mentioned earlier that turns Boonsong from monster to tragic human being, shared between the depiction of the fantastical elements and the depiction of more mundane elements that help them co-exist in harmony.

It was interesting to discover, upon doing research about Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, that there was even more subtext hidden beneath the surface than I could have ever realized. Apparently, writer/director Apichatpong Weerasethakul constructed the film to have six individual segments serving as individual homages to six different styles of filmmaking and also intended to the themes of death and passing on in the story to serve as a parallel for the waning days of movies being shot on film. Utterly fascinating stuff that makes me curious to revisit the movie and see if I can pick up on each of the homages in question and also further shows just how much depth can be unearthed from a movie as rich and thematically powerful as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.