A clean cut with a cleaver severs the film in half, a break as brutal as it is philosophically necessary, separating "Tropical Malady" into two mirror-image, antagonistic worlds. This is not a simple change of register, nor a narrative device for festival-goers. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's is an operation of splitting the cinematic atom, an act that forces the viewer to renegotiate their pact with images, to doubt the very grammar of the visible. It is a diptych film, a two-faced work that first seduces with the prose of reality and then captivates with the poetry of myth, leaving us lost in a jungle that is at once physical and psychic, external and internal.

The first half is a queer idyll of disarming, almost documentary-like delicacy. We follow Keng, a soldier on patrol, and Tong, a country boy, as their bond blossoms in rural Thailand. Weerasethakul films their encounters with a miraculous grace, capturing the awkward and tender choreography of nascent desire. Their hands brushing against each other, stolen glances, a motorcycle trip, a visit to a sacred cave, an evening at the cinema: these are fragments of a modest and sensual realism, bathed in a warm and enveloping light. There is an almost neorealist authenticity in this first part, an attention to everyday details, to the buzzing of insects, to the work in the ice factory, which seems to want to root the narrative in solid, tangible ground. The homosexuality of the protagonists is never a “theme” or a “problem” to be dissected according to the canons of Western drama; it is a fact, a feeling that flows as naturally as the river running alongside, accepted without fuss by Tong's family and the surrounding environment. It is a silent utopia, a precarious Eden whose fragility can be felt under the skin, like an impending monsoon season.

Then, darkness. A clean break. An intertitle appears announcing a new story, a folk tale about a shaman capable of transforming himself into a tiger that terrorizes villages. And the film is reborn, or rather, transmuted. Keng, or an archetypal version of him, is back on stage, but this time he is alone, armed with a rifle, immersed in the depths of an oppressive jungle. His prey is the tiger, which according to legend is the embodiment of a man's spirit. Suddenly, the linear narrative evaporates. Dialogue disappears, replaced by a telluric symphony of amplified natural sounds: the deafening chirping of cicadas, the rustling of leaves, the cries of invisible animals. Weerasethakul's jungle is not a backdrop, but a living, pulsating, sentient entity. It is a green labyrinth that swallows light and logic, a place where the laws of physics and rationality are suspended.

Here, the parallel with Werner Herzog's cinema, particularly Aguirre, the Wrath of God, arises spontaneously, but with a crucial epistemological difference. If Herzog's jungle is a mirror of colonial madness and Western hubris, Apichatpong's is a spiritual womb, a place of return to the origin where the barriers between human, animal, and divine dissolve. Keng's hunt is not an act of conquest, but a ritual of fusion. It is a pursuit that resembles courtship, a deadly dance between predator and prey whose identities become increasingly fluid and interchangeable. The tiger watching him from the darkness, with its phosphorescent eyes, could be the spirit of Tong, the object of his desire transfigured into a feral form. Attraction becomes predation, love becomes hunger.

This second half is a total immersion in magical realism, not the literary and sunny kind of García Márquez, but a darker, animistic kind, rooted in Siamese folklore. It is as if we have fallen into a painting by Henri Rousseau, The Dream, where lush and stylized nature hides a primordial threat and hypnotic beauty. The soldier, symbol of order and civilization, is gradually stripped of his certainties, devoured by the forest. His quest becomes a hallucinatory journey into the heart of darkness of his own soul, a tropical echo of Willard's journey in Apocalypse Now, but without the search for an external Kurtz. The enemy, the other, is within himself, a part of his own being that has split off and become animalized.

What, then, links these two seemingly irreconcilable souls in "Tropical Malady"? The answer, perhaps, lies in the title itself. The “tropical disease” is love itself, a fever that alters perception, a contagion that transforms. The first part of the film shows us the social and romantic symptoms of this disease; the second, its mythical and savage essence. These are two different languages to describe the same inevitable force: desire. First, it is expressed through shy gestures and whispered words in civilization; then through pure instinct, silence, and the latent violence of nature. Weerasethakul performs an operation similar to that of David Lynch in Mulholland Drive, where an apparent reality is torn apart to reveal the dreamlike nightmare that underlies it. But while Lynch explores the subconscious of Hollywood, Apichatpong explores the subconscious of an entire culture, a world in which the boundary between the visible and the invisible, between a human being and the tiger spirit that inhabits him, is constantly porous.

Metamorphosis is at the heart of the film, a concept that echoes Ovid's Metamorphoses. Tong transforms into a tiger, Keng transforms into a hunter, but the hunt itself is a transformation. In one of the most memorable and surreal scenes, a talking monkey expounds the film's philosophy to the exhausted soldier, explaining that the tiger sees him as both prey and soul mate, and that to free the beast from its feral form, he must kill it and at the same time offer himself to it. It is a Zen paradox, a koan that encapsulates the duality of Eros and Thanatos that runs through the entire work.

"Tropical Malady" is not a film to be “understood” in the traditional sense. It is a sensory and spiritual experience, a cinematic rite of passage that asks the viewer to abandon their narrative superstructures and allow themselves to be engulfed. Shot in grainy 16mm, which gives the images a tactile, almost organic quality, the film is a masterpiece of sound design and atmospheric direction. Weerasethakul teaches us that cinema can be a portal, a vehicle for accessing altered states of consciousness, a world where legends still walk the earth and where a lover's soul can have the glowing eyes of a tiger in the night. It is a work that, once we have finished watching it, continues to live within us, like the memory of a strange and beautiful fever, like the indecipherable murmur of a jungle that spoke to us in a forgotten language.