Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

(Not Rated)

***

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

This “dream-like” and “much-celebrated” film from Thailand is sometimes resistant to logical analysis, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. Uncle Boonmee, a dying farmer who believes in reincarnation, is able to summon up visions from past lives and even converse with his late wife and son from this one. “I can’t pretend to understand the intricacies of the Buddhist belief system” that accounts for each mythical creature we see on-screen, but understanding isn’t necessary. “Those who insist on a linear narrative” may get frustrated, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. But this is “not a difficult film,” and if you’re patient, “it can produce something close to bliss.” The key to understanding why, for instance, a catfish seduces a princess in one scene is that, for a Buddhist, “there is no real boundary between past and present, dream and reality, body and spirit.” So forget the rules of Western storytelling, said David Lewis in the San Francisco Chronicle. This “boldly original, oddly affecting meditation on the afterlife will linger in your consciousness (or subconsciousness)” for as many lives as you live.