Review: Sinuous ‘Cemetery of Splendor’ gently melds the everyday and the supernatural

Apichatpong Weerasethakul conjures ghost stories as no one else can. Quiet and unrushed, they offer matter-of-fact glimpses of the invisible world. “Cemetery of Splendor,” his latest feat of lyrical synthesis, unwinds like a waking, enveloping dream. It’s a sinuous tale shaped by the writer-director’s favorite motifs — animism and medicine — and by sideways glances at the myths, religious traditions and political convulsions of his native Thailand.

In a remote rural hospital — an improvised structure on the site of a former school — a middle-aged volunteer, Jen (Jenjira Pongpas), cares for ailing soldier Itt (Banlop Lomnoi). He’s one of a group of young veterans being treated for an unexplained illness that makes them sleep most of the time. While the doctors and nurses administer ventilators and mesmerizingly lovely colored lights, a psychic, Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), tends to the soldiers’ anxious families, channeling the unconscious men’s visions and thoughts.

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Weerasethakul has a feel for the workaday as much as for the numinous. Most of the soldiers’ relatives want to know what the men think of planned home improvements or which foods they’d like to eat upon waking. They also ask Keng for lottery numbers. But Jen, who quickly takes Itt to heart as the son she never had, seeks a deeper communion, especially after a crucial encounter with two figures from the afterlife.

Teaming for the first time with the cinematographer Diego Garcia, Weerasethakul works at his typical, loving remove, framing most interactions from a studied distance. The pace is meditative (and meditation is one of the treatments for the patients). Each scene, beneath its surface calm, throbs with longing, dislocation and intricately woven layers of time.

Beyond Jen’s memories of a crumbling schoolroom, and beyond the marks on trees bearing witness to floods, there are restless spirits about, long-dead warrior kings who aren’t done waging battle. And all the while someone runs an earth digger just outside the clinic, stoking paranoia about the Thai government and the FBI, not to mention fiber-optic cable companies. In this “Cemetery,” with its kitschy lakeside shrines and spectral multiplex escalators, it’s possible to enter another soul’s dreams, and learn to see.

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‘Cemetery of Splendor’

In Thai with English subtitles

No rating

Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes

Playing: Laemmle’s Royal, West Los Angeles; Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, Pasadena (Saturday and Sunday matinees only, full run in Pasadena begins March 18)