To watch a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul is to learn how to read cinema all over again. It is an exercise in sensory deprogramming that asks us to abandon the narrative categories to which decades of Hollywood and arthouse grammar have accustomed us. We find ourselves disarmed, stripped of our usual interpretive compasses—plot, conflict, resolution—and forced to tune into different frequencies: those of the jungle’s breath, of silences heavy with presences, of the dream-logic that governs a world where the boundary between life, death, dream, and memory is not a line, but a permeable fog. "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives", the 2010 Palme d'Or winner at Cannes and the pinnacle of the Thai director’s filmography, is perhaps the purest and most accessible expression of this radical poetics. It is a film not to be watched, but to be inhabited; a liminal experience that settles under the skin, only to resurface at unexpected moments, like the memory of a forgotten dream.

The premise, almost deceptive in its simplicity, follows Boonmee, a man suffering from kidney failure who returns to his country home in the Isan region to spend his final days. Tending to him are his sister-in-law, Jen, and the young Tong. So far, everything might suggest an elegiac family drama about illness and accepting the end. But Weerasethakul, who is as much a filmmaker as he is a visual artist and an anthropologist of the spirit, shatters every expectation almost immediately. During a perfectly ordinary evening meal, two figures appear. The first is the ghost of Huay, Boonmee’s deceased wife, who materializes at the dinner table with the same nonchalance one might use to ask for the salt. Shortly after, Boonsong, his son who disappeared years ago, emerges from the darkness of the forest, now transformed into a “Monkey Ghost,” an ape-like creature with black fur and incandescent red eyes.

The staggering greatness of the scene lies in its utter lack of sensationalism. There is no jolt in the score, no frantic editing. The living characters’ reaction is one of surprise, certainly, but it’s tempered by an almost immediate acceptance. It is the logic of Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism translated into the language of contemplative cinema. The supernatural is not an intrusion that violates the laws of the real; it is an intrinsic, everyday component of the real itself. In this universe, permeated by animism and Buddhist beliefs, the spirits of ancestors and the creatures of the forest are not “other” than the human world, but an extension of it—another frequency of the same reality. The Monkey Ghost, with its red eyes piercing the dark, might seem like something out of a B-horror movie, but its essence is melancholic and gentle. His transformation, he explains, was caused by mating with a forest creature—a direct echo of the metamorphoses that populate classical mythology, from Ovid onwards.

This film is the concluding cinematic act of the Primitive Project, a multi-platform installation with which Weerasethakul explored the memory, violence, and mythology of the Isan region, and particularly the village of Nabua. In the 1960s and 70s, this area was the site of a brutal crackdown by the Thai army on farmers accused of communist sympathies. Weerasethakul does not make a political film in the conventional sense; there is no didactic denunciation or historical reconstruction. Rather, he embodies the idea that the landscape itself is a living archive of traumas and stories. The jungle surrounding Boonmee’s house is not a backdrop but a sentient protagonist, an organism that breathes and remembers. The deafening sounds of insects, the rustling of leaves, the impenetrable darkness are not decorative elements, but the voice of this ancestral and historical memory. In this, Weerasethakul’s cinema finds an unexpected travelling companion in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker: in both films, a physical place—the Zone, the jungle—becomes a metaphysical space, an entity capable of reflecting and materializing the characters’ inner states.

Boonmee himself is a vessel for this collective memory. His illness becomes the catalyst that dissolves the boundaries of his individual self, allowing him to “recall” his past lives: a water buffalo, a princess, perhaps even a catfish. The film takes an extraordinary narrative detour to tell us of one of these lives, that of a disfigured princess who offers her body to a talking catfish in an enchanted pond. The sequence, shot on film stock with a deliberately dated and “poor” look, feels like a fragment from an old Thai fantasy movie. It is a lyrical, erotic, and unsettling interlude that expands on the theme of metamorphosis and the fluidity of identity. It is proof that for Weerasethakul, reincarnation is not just a theological concept but a narrative principle: stories, like souls, migrate across bodies, genres, and even species.

Boonmee’s journey culminates in a cave, a place he recognizes as the site of his first birth. The cave is a universal archetype: the womb of Mother Earth, the crossing point between worlds, the unconscious. Here, surrounded by his living and dead relatives, Boonmee prepares to dissolve. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s cinematography captures the scene with a dim, painterly light, transforming the cave into a primordial sanctuary. Death is not presented as a tragic end, but as a return, a rejoining with the cosmic cycle of which an individual existence is but a temporary manifestation.

If the film were to end here, it would already be a masterpiece of spiritual cinema. But Weerasethakul holds one last, disorienting stroke of genius in store for us. After Boonmee’s funeral, we find ourselves in a hotel room. Tong, who has since become a monk, is watching television with Jen. In a moment of pure meta-cinematic magic, which evokes the splintering selves of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, Tong stands up; his physical body remains watching TV, while a transparent, spectral version of him leaves the room with Jen to go to dinner. What is this duplication? It is a commentary on the very nature of viewership. We, the audience, like Tong’s double, are spectral presences observing a projected reality. We are ghosts in the cinema. Weerasethakul closes his film about the interconnectedness of all things with an image that reflects on the fundamental separation between observer and observed, between reality and its representation. It is a dizzying intellectual gesture that opens the film to infinite readings: on modernity clashing with tradition, on the schizophrenia of contemporary identity, on the power of cinema to create spectral doubles of the world.

"Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" is a work that refuses to be completely grasped, a visual poem that operates by an accumulation of sensations rather than by logical development. It asks the viewer to surrender, to let oneself be carried along by its slow, hypnotic current. It is a film that teaches us to see the world not as a collection of separate objects, but as a vibrant web of spirits, memories, and transformations. It is a manual for unlearning our certainties and rediscovering the magic that lurks in the porous fabric of the real. And in an age of hyper-structured narratives and omnipresent explanations, a work that celebrates mystery with such serene and profound conviction is not just a masterpiece; it is an act of necessary resistance.