Simpati (2019)

So there I was, cuppa in hand, kids finally in bed, settling in to tick Brunei off my A-Z World Movie Tour. Brunei. A country where the film industry is, to put it kindly, still finding its feet. I genuinely did not know what to expect, and I'll be honest, I checked Letterboxd before pressing play and found precisely zero reviews. None. I am, as far as Letterboxd is concerned, the first person to have watched this and written anything down. That fact alone felt like it deserved a moment of acknowledgement.

Right, so. Simpati. Where to begin.

Fair play to everyone involved in making it. Getting a film made at all in a country where the infrastructure barely exists is genuinely impressive, and I don't want to lose sight of that. There's clearly heart here. You can feel the effort behind every frame. But good intentions and a finished film are two different things, and unfortunately Simpati sits awkwardly between them.

The technical side is rough. Really rough. The sound quality sounds like it was recorded through a tin can in a corridor, and I spent a fair chunk of the running time leaning forward squinting at the screen as if that might somehow help me hear better. The lighting is, to be generous, functional in places and non-existent in others. I've watched school productions with more controlled cinematography. The camera work is shaky in ways that don't feel deliberate or stylistic, just underequipped. These aren't fatal sins on their own, plenty of low-budget films have overcome worse, but they do make the experience a hard slog.

Then there's the story itself, and this is where I have the most complicated feelings. Simpati is trying to tackle racism toward the Chinese community in Brunei, which is a genuinely worthwhile subject and, as far as I can tell, not one that gets much screen time anywhere. I respect the ambition enormously. But the handling of it left me cold. The messaging comes across as clunky and heavy-handed, the kind of thing where characters exist less as people and more as vehicles for the point the film wants to make. It ends up feeling like being lectured over dinner by someone who means well but hasn't quite worked out how to make the argument land. Good storytelling sneaks the theme in through character and situation. This one announces it, repeatedly, and then announces it again.

It reminded me a little of my experience watching Lost Boy in Juba (2017), another film where I could see the sincerity of what the filmmakers were trying to do, but the execution didn't quite meet the intention. The difference there was that the subject matter carried enough raw weight to compensate. Here, the technical limitations and the blunt storytelling pile up on top of each other, and there's not quite enough holding it together.

Would I recommend it? That depends entirely on why you're watching. If you're a film student with a thesis on emerging Southeast Asian cinema, or if you're doing something daft like an A-Z World Movie Tour like me, then yes, it's worth an hour or so of your time. It exists, it has things to say, and being the person who introduced it to Letterboxd does give me a strange sort of pioneer energy I'm quite enjoying. But if you're after something to watch on a Friday night with no particular agenda, this probably isn't it.

Here's what I'll say in closing. Brunei's film scene is in its infancy, and Simpati is a start. Someone made something. Someone had a story they wanted to tell about prejudice and community in a country that doesn't often get told through film. I'll raise my mug to that, genuinely. But the next one needs a better mic, some proper lighting, and a script that trusts the audience to get there without being pushed every five minutes. Two stars, and both of them are for the effort.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2025-05-27

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