Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)
There's a moment in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives where a man sits at a dinner table making polite conversation with the ghost of his dead wife and the glowing-eyed spirit of his long-lost son, and everyone just... gets on with it. No panic, no disbelief, just passing the food and catching up. I watched that scene and genuinely couldn't decide whether I was witnessing something profound or something that had completely lost me. By the end of the film, I'd made up my mind: it was the latter.
I came to this one as part of my World Movie Cup challenge, and it sits as apparently the third most popular Thai film going, right behind the brilliant How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies and the frankly punishing Only God Forgives. It also carries some serious credentials: this was the first Thai film ever to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, taking home the top prize in 2010. That's a historic achievement by any measure. Which makes it all the stranger that the best I could track down on Amazon was a grainy SD transfer. For a film of that pedigree, you'd expect someone to have sorted out a proper remaster by now. But there you go.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film follows Uncle Boonmee, played by Thanapat Saisaymar, as he spends his final days in the Thai countryside, his kidneys failing, his past lives apparently crowding in around him. His sister-in-law Jen, played by Jenjira Pongpas, is there to keep him company, and so, before long, are the spirits of those he's lost. It's structured like a kind of Buddhist last supper, quiet and deliberate, with death treated not as a terror but as a gentle threshold. I can see what Weerasethakul is after. The idea that the boundary between the living and the dead is simply porous, that you might sit down for dinner with a ghost the same way you'd sit down with an old friend, is genuinely moving as a concept.
The trouble is that concept and experience are two very different things. To feel anything for the people on screen, you need some kind of foothold, and I couldn't find one. The pacing is glacial. Now, slow cinema can be extraordinary. I've seen films where stillness accumulates into something overwhelming. Here, though, the stillness just sat there. The meditative atmosphere Weerasethakul is clearly striving for felt, to me, more like watching someone else's home video of a séance. Respectful, hushed, and almost entirely unreachable.
I want to be honest about something: I'm fairly sure a lot of what this film is doing is rooted in specifically Thai Buddhist ideas about death, reincarnation and the spirit world, ideas I don't carry with me as a Western viewer. That cultural distance probably accounts for some of my detachment. The matter-of-fact acceptance of spirits at the dinner table, the past lives recalled without drama, the strange detours into myth and fable, these things presumably land very differently for an audience who grew up with those frameworks. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
But I also think a film has to do some of the work of bringing you across that distance. And Uncle Boonmee doesn't seem especially interested in doing that. It assumes a frequency you're either on or you're not. I wasn't on it.
Sakda Kaewbuadee as the spirit son, all dark fur and those eerie glowing eyes, is an arresting image. There's a strange, dreamlike sequence involving a princess and a catfish that I genuinely couldn't make head or tail of, but which lodged itself in my brain anyway. The film has images that stay with you. It just didn't make me feel anything while I was watching them.
Two stars. Undeniably singular, culturally significant, and made with complete conviction. But if a film leaves you feeling this detached from beginning to end, something in the communication has broken down. Not every Palme d'Or winner is going to work for every viewer, and this one, for all my good intentions, just didn't work for me.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2010 | Watched: 2026-06-10
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