Come Here

A striking work of mood and atmosphere from one of Thailand’s most daring formalist filmmakers.

Four twentysomething actors travel to Kanchanaburi to visit the Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum, a monument to an especially ghastly section of the infamous WWII Death Railway. But, finding the museum closed, they instead drift back to their rented raft house and languish away their time drinking, getting high and imitating various animals. Elsewhere in the same forest, a distraught woman undergoes a mysterious transformation.

Anocha Suwichakornpong (By the Time It Gets Dark, MIFF 2017) returns with a nonchalant filmic collage that packs thematic shadows common to her previous works – the pervasive weight of history, the line where cinema and memory meet, representation and performativity – into a lush dream-state of repetition and formal experimentation. Shooting over just five days in a monochromatic 4:3 aspect ratio, Suwichakornpong utilises split screens, animated sequences, deep focus and a largely script-free narrative to explore an anachronistic sense of time and place. Visually breathtaking, Come Here is experiential cinema at its most fluid and elemental.

“A transportive Thai odyssey … Suwichakornpong is a growing master of temporal shifts, her work not so much fragmented as machine-cut into precise, interlocking patterns.” – The Film Stage