Rent Cemetery of Splendour (2015)

Local Legend Has It - Cemetery of Splendour review by griggs

There's a moment near the end, walking through the empty field where the gym used to stand, that got me more than I expected from a film made almost entirely of people sleeping.

That's the thing about Apichatpong Weerasethakul — you spend ages waiting for it to "go somewhere," then remember that's never been the plan. Soldiers come down with a sleeping sickness, get bedded out in that disused gym under shifting coloured light, and local legend has it they're being drained of energy to fight some ancient king's war from underneath the building. Jenjira, nursing a bad leg of her own, anchors it all — and there's a warmth and a dry humour in this that the slowness tends to hide. The psychic medium subplot is the most fun the film allows itself. Itt, the soldier she takes under her wing, barely speaks, yet says more lying still than most actors manage standing up.

What looks like slowness isn't really that — it's methodical, deadpan, almost trance-like, which is just how Weerasethakul works. I don't have much patience for it most days, though it's hard to call that the film's problem. Still oddly compelling to watch, even when nothing's happening — which, here, is often.

Spoilers follow ... - Cemetery of Splendour review by NP

I love it when a film comes along that changes the perceptions of how a story should be told. Apart from being entertaining in its own right, it shakes up (to a limited extent) the tired, tried and tested mainstream diet of CGI, diluted scares and catwalk model actors with identi-kit personalities. ‘Cemetery of Splendor’ couldn’t be further than that style of blandness. And yet in rejecting everything stale about traditional storytelling, it sadly creates a blandness all its own.

A school in Northern Thailand has been turned into a makeshift hospital to house soldiers who have been afflicted by an unexplained sleeping sickness, which renders them comatose for vast periods of time, punctuated by periods of awakening.

Volunteer Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas) strikes up a friendship with patient Itt (Banlob Lomnoi) during his few hours of wakefulness. There is speculation that the school was built over a cemetery and the dead are feeding off the minds of the sleeping soldiers. Jenjira also becomes friendly with Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), who claims to have some rapport with the sleepers.

That is about all as far as a story is concerned, and it is stretched far, far beyond interest to fill the 2 hour running time. The frustration I felt watching is that anything else dramatic was not likely to occur grew the further in I ventured. There’s no need for scenes of so little happening to last so long, one after the other. All these elongated moments are deliberate artistic decisions, and so cannot be brushed away by budgetary or lack-of-time reasons. And the film has attracted a mass of critical acclaim – so clearly, I just didn’t ‘get’ it.

The camera is primarily static. People wander in and out of shot just as they would in a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Sometimes you only see the back of a character’s head throughout the scene. In true documentary style, the acting is very naturalistic and the characters very believable. While I would commend director/writer Apichatpong Weerasethakul for refusing to utilise anything traditional about this project, and am glad his work has attracted the commendations of critics, this is so uncommercial, it is sadly deeply un-enthralling.

zzzzzzzzzz - Cemetery of Splendour review by CSF

The soldiers of the film are not the only one to have a long sleep, I had as well. I don't know what more I could say to make the 100 words. The story is like a never ending documentary on the fact that these soldiers have to sleep all the time and nobody knows why so they start to invent fairy tales to explain it: a classic.