Critics reviews

Apichatpong Weerasethakul has developed a particular adeptness at concentrating his aesthetic and thematic ideas into contained set pieces, and Cemetery of Splendor foregrounds one of his most memorable: a homely rural clinic neatly lined with glowing orb sticks that fluctuate neon hues in sync with the REM patterns of the snoozing Thai war veterans situated beneath them. The film's becalming rhythm, too, seems rigged to these mysterious instruments.

Itt's dreams are particularly vivid and, as channeled and described by Keng, take Jen into Thailand's deep, tumultuous past. Nevertheless, and despite a brief visit from two goddesses, "Cemetery of Splendor" is more matter-of-fact than visionary. Somewhat paradoxically, it's also Mr. Weerasethakul's most serene film.

Weerasethakul erases the line between dream and reality using only the barest of means. This essential film followed me around for weeks after I saw it.

A vital addition to a cogent body of work... More sedate than Uncle Boonmee, but no less radical, challenging or beguiling.

It rests on Apichatpong's familiar metaphor of sickness and the drive to heal it... For Apichatpong, though, what Buddhists see as spiritual sicknesses – the mental impediments to achieving nirvana – always trump purely physical maladies, tropical or otherwise. The diagnosis here, as in several of the Korean master Jang Sunwoo's explicitly Buddhist films, is situation critical, and probably inoperable.

As they meander along, Keng/Itt describes the invisible splendors of world in which he spends his sleeping life—the palaces of the undead kings... It's an astonishing sequence, at first ridiculous and then more and more affecting, its cumulative power entirely dependent on Weerasethakul's unique way of committing to his material without ever quite tipping his hand.

A gauzy dreamscape of life in a rural Thai hospital, Apichatpong's camera rests calmly on comatose soldiers and the quirky women who look after them. Nestling into the nooks of Thai superstitions and playing with both natural and LED light, Apichatpong offers an enchanting interpretation of where our sleeping and waking minds wander.

What non-Thai viewers will undoubtedly take away from Cemetery of Splendour is its preternatural calm, embodied by the curved light fixtures next to the patients' beds. What does it mean? Joe's not saying. And for his cinema that's as it should be. How else can the inexpressible be expressed?

It's difficult to say what Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Cemetery of Splendor" is about, and in many respects, to discuss its meaning would be to diminish it. The film works the way a Shakespearean sonnet works in that it actually increases its impact the moment it's over. Within its structure lies multiple intersecting and contradicting arcs of meaning, none of which cancel each other out but instead create a vast pool of associations.

A theme central to Apichatpong's work is that of the secret world hidden behind the visible one, whether historical, political, or metaphysical. What Apichatpong gives us in Cemetery is the sense of an immediate magic that dispenses with special effects (as used in Tropical Malady and Uncle Boonmee…) to more directly address the imagination—to make us re-imagine what's in front of our eyes.

Can sleep be an active as opposed to a passive process? As usual with Apichatpong, but more seamlessly than ever, Cemetery induces a sensation of lucid dreaming and of heightened sensory awareness... It's a rare film that can so vividly take shape as a palimpsest in the mind's eye. There are no monkey ghosts or sexually adept catfish in Cemetery of Splendour, but this is unmistakably a haunted world: one where the past persists in the present, and memory and myth intrude on physical space.

There's a cultural specificity to this movie that will make it, for Western audiences, even more enigmatic than it is in its Thai context. This ought not be a stumbling block, though. "Cemetery of Splendour" has an emotional pull that's terribly sad and that practically transcends its underpinnings in political allegory.