Critics reviews

Mekong Hotel is often labelled a "docu-fiction." But this formulation is still too brittle to harness the film's winking, swirling sense of play. Apichatpong's tricks firmly place both terms—documentary and fiction—within quotation marks, as in an early scene involving a performance—or a rehearsal?—of a bit dialogue, after which the actors turn to the camera in a unison so spookily contrived that it defuses the whole "breaking of the fourth wall" thing instigated in the first place.

Delivered with characteristically lengthy takes and a nearly incessant meandering guitar track, this is a strong contender for most laid-back sci-fi/horror movie ever made... As a whole, it has the insistent logic of several different films existing at once. Don't let the brisk runtime convince you to overlook MEKONG HOTEL; it delivers all the joy and mystery you expect of a Weerasethakul movie.

The static camera, regarding its subjects with a halcyon fascination, and the river with the pinkish sky above, come together to create a mood of tabula rasa, of vast potential still yet to be tapped. If this isn't a major work by Weerasethakul, then it's one that suggests that there's a great deal more evocative, provocative work yet to come.

Placid in tone and self-consciously informal in style, Mekong Hotel is also deeply moving, especially in the final minutes, when the ghosts that have haunted so much of Apitchatpong's recent work become embodied by a mother and daughter, who mourn for all of the mothers and daughters who have been lost in the region's tragic past.

This is a mood piece through and through; the position of the camera and the characteristically dense sound design are as crucial to the thematic content as anything the performers say or do.

More coherent in tone than in overall effect, Mekong Hotel is like a memory piece that seems to have forgotten what it's memorializing. This might be appropriate, especially since the film, like so much of Apichatpong's work, is about the malleability of identity and the need to figure out life's next step despite the destabilizing trauma of the past.

After mulling it over for a few days, I'm not sure that I'm any more able to make heads or tails of it, and yet its relaxed, fluid cadence and jarring juxtapositions only improve with memory; a weird, lovely afternoon daydream that comes neither apart nor more coherently together upon reflection.

Mekong Hotel seems to operate on two planes of time. On the image track and in the dialogue, we witness Tong and Phon on the terrace or walking along the river. But the music, snatches of repetitive guitar tunes, seems to come from another time frame.

While there is little doubt that Mekong Hotel will be remembered as a minor contribution to Apichatpong's overall corpus (not unlike earlier projects such as Haunted Houses, or Ashes from earlier this year), it is good to see him still capable of working within the narrowest of aesthetic constraints and locating the deeply strange within the mundane.

Mekong Hotel is something like a documentary that quickly mutates and splits into several different genres: a sci-fi film (featuring a device for capturing ghosts), a family movie, a ghost story, a horror flick, and finally a musical. (Though in a sense, all Apichatpong films, without exception, are musicals.)

Generally speaking, I'm a fan of "Joe's" beguiling blend of naturalism and animism. But the hour-long Mekong Hotel, conspicuously filed under Special Screenings rather than Competition or even Un Certain Regard, barely even qualifies as a doodle. Indeed, much of the film is incomprehensible without the director's personal introduction or access to press notes.

It is a small film of disparate parts in flux but held in a fragile, wispy unity.