Critics reviews

What Yeo evokes in A Land Imagined is a sense of limitless possibility literally stretching out to the horizon, even as the spectre of work—its accompanying threats of unemployment, injury, and exploitation—holds sway over a vast majority of the world’s population so that the title’s far-off land remains out of reach.

It’s a pro forma plotline, to be sure, but one that has a forceful undertow, an uncanny verisimilitude that owes something to the numerous non-actors that took part in the production.

Not all of the ensuing plot pieces ultimately fit together in a coherent way (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), and Yeow's dependence on the idea of land reclamation as a metaphor for Singapore's uneven economic ascent is effective yet a touch heavy-handed (especially when one character explicitly spells it out). But on the whole, this is an impressive and provocative movie, likely to reward to repeat viewings.

Yeo has given this noirish tale an appropriately lustrous treatment, with saturated long shots of black derricks looming against a red sky or sunk in sickly orange murk. Lyrical slow-motion musical interludes enhance the dreamlike ambience, and there’s a post-Wong-Kar-wai freedom of camera placement in the candy-colored cybercafé.

The film is a pleasingly seductive mix of social drama and urban noir. With a keen sense of style and atmosphere, Yeo, aided by Hideho Urata’s neon-streaked cinematography, confidently plumbs cinema’s oneiric depths, conjuring parallel purgatories of real and imagined consequence.

Cinematographer Hideho Urata lends the film’s night scenes the lurid neon-noir aesthetics of Miami Vice, and editor (and great filmmaker in his own right) Daniel Hui delicately maintains the film’s balance between its serpentine plotline and understated political commentary.