So this is a recent movie (2004), by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. He apparently is known for his surrealist, experimental style, and boy howdy I can see that here.

So the start of the movie is about a soldier who meets a… “farmboy” sounds not quite right, but I guess that’s what he is? But like mostly grown, not a kid. Anyway, the movie explores their growing intimacy as friendship turns to romance, in a series of mostly disconnected scenes — taking his dog to the vet, exploring a cave shrine beneath a temple, at a fair(?) where one of them goes onstage and sings, etc. And so okay, you know what kind of movie this is, it’s one of those slow, character-driven relationship movies.

And then, halfway through the movie (it’s just under two hours, so we’re not very far in), it shifts radically. There’s a little retelling of a fairy tale about a tiger spirit and a hunter, and then there’s a title scene, and abbreviated credits telling us that this movie stars the actors who are already the protagonists of the movie, and now we’re effectively watching a completely different movie, about a soldier (the same actor as the soldier from the rest of the movie, but it’s tbh not 100% clear if he’s supposed to be playing the same character or not) who gets lost in the forest looking for the “monster” that killed a cow; the monster turns out to be the tiger spirit, in the form of the actor who played the farmboy (who is almost certainly not playing the same character).

What follows is tense scenes of the soldier tracking the tiger spirit, including a part where he’s following noises at night with a (period-accurate!) super-shitty flashlight that only illuminates a small circle, so those kind of first-person shots where someone is slowly panning a flashlight across dense trees at night. There are scenes of him doing survival stuff like catching fish. There’s a fight between him and the tiger spirit that ends with him being thrown down a hill. There’s a monkey, which explains to him (it makes monkey noises, but they’re translated via subtitle) that the tiger spirit is both his hunter and his companion, and that he faces a choice of killing it or joining it in death. And there’s a final encounter between the spirit (now a literal tiger) and the soldier.

And so superficially this is two totally unconnected movies that happen to share actors, but p. obviously the mythic/allegory half of the movie is meant to reflect on and illuminate the dynamics of the mundane/realistic first half of the movie; and while I’m not going to rewatch this movie again right away, I suspect that doing so would give a lot of insights. If you ever find yourself needing to write a paper on a movie, this would be a good one to choose.