Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Derry Herrera Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

SnoopyStyle In Thailand, an elementary school has been turned into a clinic to care for soldiers suffering from a mysterious sudden sleeping sickness. Jenjira is a housewife volunteer at the clinic. She takes more interest in one particular patient Itt. Whenever he wakes, she befriends him. Others claim the school was built on an ancient Royal cemetery and the soldier's energy are being drained to fight battles in the other world. Jenjira befriends medium Keng who claims to be able to be possessed by the comatose men.The camera style is very static. The camera is set up in one position and the scene unfolds without any edits. These scenes last as long as a minute or two. It has a hypnotic feel at first but it does get boring after awhile. The central mystery keeps one's interest but it gets more and more perplexing. It becomes an exercise in surreal storytelling. There are some head-scratching things going on and sometimes I wonder if they are dreams. Also why are they digging up the field? It would be more compelling if the visuals could be more surreal. They need to be more imaginative and crazier. The movie needs to explain better or be completely inexplicable.

zacknabo When watching Cemetery of Splendour or any of Weerasethakul's films one needs to recall Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" because any fraught attempts to find out "what it means" is pointless and can only diminish the work. For the first time since Andrei Tarkovsky's death has a director so keenly picked up on Tarkovsky's views of what film could and should be and begun to carry the torch, making each Weerasethakul film a treasure, because it is all about the poetic experience and the boundless possibility of the cinema: film as dream, film as memory, film as history, film as life and most importantly film as a spiritual and seamless transitory mixture of all of the above. His images stick with you for a lifetime. His films roll with associations and pure natural beauty fixating the filmic experience as memories of a collective past, near or distant. He scrapes the subconscious mind, brings the viewer into a sublime world of the surreal, the magical, while managing to remain rooted in reality, and at times in the mundane leisure of a slow-paced life that flows like the Mekong River, a place that Weerasethakul finds himself time and time again.Cemetery of Splendour takes place near the Mekong in Khon Kaen, Thailand, in which Thai soldiers find themselves in an old rural hospital that once functioned as a school, beset by a mysterious supernatural-like sleeping disorder where they sleep nearly non-stop in small cots day and night, occasionally waking up. Nurses and volunteers sit by their besides, talk to them, wash them, etc. The cots are all connected to a series of long curved incandescent tubes that glow gloriously, pulsating vibrant colors from green to red and red to blue and back to green, captured beautifully by Weerasethakul's camera. Outside the government is digging up ground with the rumored intention of relocating the hospital. Children play in the dirt mounds and life happens. These are the parts of Weerasethakul's films that there is no need to explain. It adds dimension to the life that is taking place within the film. It is past, present and future overlapping one another.One of the volunteers is Jen (Jenjira Pongpas Widner a Weerasethakul regular), a woman that walks with crutches, one leg longer than the other. Jen helps one of the soldiers in particular, a soldier by the name of Itt (Banlop Lomnoi). Something draws her to this boy, maybe because his bed is where her desk once sat years earlier when she attended school there. Weerasethakul is constantly doing this in nearly all of his work, he has an impeccable ability to leave the temporal and spatial planes of existence undefined, allowing them to flow into and through one another whenever the need arises. She states early in the film that she feels as if she had become "synchronized" with the soldiers, a bad sleeper she is sleeping easier now that she is back in Khon Kaen, as if the "soldiers are sleeping for her." She begins to feel that Itt is the son she never had. The scenes in which she bathes him have a beautiful and careful intimacy reminiscent of Camera's nurse character bathing Alicia in Talk to Her. Itt begins to wake up. They take walks, talk intimately about their lives, eat and just as suddenly as he awakes he can fall back to sleep. There is a very interesting character who Jen also befriends rather quickly by the name of Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram) a medium who can see into the soldiers past lives while they are sleeping and can communicate with the soldiers in their dreams (and possibly bridge reality and dream between characters). The mood of accepting a ghostly history runs through Cemtery like veins, Weerasethakul blends the supernatural with conservative realism more matter-of-factly than possibly any director before. Jen is a pious woman who takes animal statuettes (that illicit the power of various prayers) to a temple where she goes to pray to two Laotian goddesses. We see her do this with her American husband—Jen's real life husband as well, a way for Weerasethakul to mix fiction and reality—and in the next seen we find Jen in the park eating a snack approached by two women who think her for the animal statuettes that she honored them with. The two women claim to be the long dead Laotian princesses (turned goddesses) that Jen prays to daily, yet the scene takes plays like any other daily meeting; it is this spatial and temporal convergence that marks Weerasethakul's work and only continues to build throughout Cemetery of Splendour. The goddesses also relate to Jen that the improvised hospital is buried on an ancient cemetery for kings and soldiers who continue to do battle without the constraints of life as we know it or time as we know it and they drain the energy from the soldiers which is why the soldiers can never get better. In a place where death, life, past and present are so active one cannot escape the past, for better or for worse; these are the staples of Weerasethakul's world, with the message that says, you might as well embrace the sublimity of it all, because we are surrounded by the ghosts of everything that has come before and will become ghosts as well.

Red_Identity Without having known before, 20 minutes into the film I guessed that it was from the same director of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Weirdly, I didn't take to that film much. I appreciated it greatly, and I did get more out of it on my second viewing of it, but it still left me feeling very distant. I found this much more fixating and engrossing, even if the pace does get to me at times. It's amazingly directed and I think that carries it a long way, but it also benefited from being more grounded on a simple thematic level than Boonmee. Not for everyone, but definitely a film to watch out for. Not recommended for everyone, just for those who know exactly what they're getting into.

FUYIN I didn't vote for this movie with a lots of scores since it's not a movie suitable for all the people. I didn't mean there are some limited level stuff, but just not all the people can understand or just have the patience to understand the materials and the message this movie would want us to see. Well, frankly speaking, for this director, this movie is already easy and simple enough. Because this director really enjoy to tell a story in this kind of way and created an atmosphere mixed with both mystery and holy stuff. I think there just one part I would like to say and hope it is not count as spoiler. At the end of the movie , when the Keng and the old lady sit on the chair and Kend was licking her leg. My understanding about that is the spirit of the lady is already gone , which replaced by the Keng's spirit. And Keng's body is filled by the spirit of the man laying on the bed. They have some love issues with each other an that is why they are licking each other. That is just my perspective, hope people could understand and just take that as a comments .