Jen and Itt's relationship is the main story, I suppose, but that would be like saying "Hamlet" is "about" a boy and his mother. While the film unfolds, you are caught in its undulating rhythms, drawn from image to image, given the time to contemplate the juxtaposition, how the film is put together and why. It's so rich that way. Once the screen goes to black, you are left to your own devices in terms of interpretation. There are other recent films in this tradition, "Upstream Color," "Post Tenebras Lux," where meaning is contained IN the images: the films are like entering someone else's dream-logic. Things "make sense" in profound dreams, and the dreamer may feel he is being given a kind of truth unavailable to him in the waking world. 

Weerasethakul's other films (most notably "Uncle Boonmee" and "Syndromes and a Century") share some similarities with "Cemetery." The fantastical and surreal are presented with unshowy practicality. It's magical realism mixed with kitchen-sink drama, seasoned by a haunting sense of history as a sentient entity. A "ghost" isn't necessarily a spooky creature moving through walls. A ghost could also calmly sit down at the table and join the conversation. When death is near, the past comes flooding into the present, and sometimes the past bears a message, but how to de-code it? Perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps what matters is that we are connected to those who came before, that we honor them, and that we try to hear them.

Yet other forces soon impinge on the everyday calm. When Jen comes across two beautiful young women hawking clothes, they casually reveal themselves to be centuries-old dead Laotian goddesses. They mention in passing that an ancient cemetery lies beneath the hospital, with the kings and warriors buried there draining the sleeping soldiers of their energy so they can keep fighting their age-old wars. As Jen, Keng, and Itt grow closer, their thoughts, dreams, and eventually even bodies gradually merge, led by and suffused with all the rippling layers of reality this place contains. This mood of progressive convergence is amplified by the deliberately hazy spatial relationships between each location, as school, lake, park, city, and temple all flow together to form a borderless dreamscape equally unburdened by temporal continuity. The neon lights by the soldiers’ beds soon cast their glow across the entire town; a sumptuous palace of past days is verbally conjured out of an overgrown garden; and, as the sun threatens to break through the clouds, an amoeba slowly inches its way across the image.

On Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery of Splendour