This kind of disorientation isn’t without potency or pleasure, and for a tale of displacement, it’s a fittingly hazy mood. But Aroonpheng’s worldbuilding is arcane to a fault, with no thanks to a weirdly flat rhythm that dulls the excitement of the film’s many narrative swerves. Competing in Venice’s Orizzonti sidebar, it’s a bit of a letdown considering the promise of “Manta Ray,” Aroonpheng’s waterlogged ghost tale, which won the section when it bowed there in 2018.
There are intimations of a state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing, especially when the soldiers set the man’s cottage aflame. But right before you think you’ve got a grip on what’s happening, Aroonpheng throws us out of this totalitarian thriller and into the seat of a motorbike romance involving one of the more clueless cops from earlier, Lak (Pakapol Srirongmuang), and his sweetheart Aepoh (Phunthida Phairuangkij).
That’s the first of several remaining hard pivots that reveal Aepoh — and later, her Karen kinswoman Aeva (Waywiree Ittianunkul) — as uprooted victims of the authorities’ clearings. In restrained, naturalistic vignettes, Aepoh mans a market stand and tentatively succumbs to Lak’s overtures; meanwhile, Aeva works as a nanny for a bougie middle-class family while leaving her own young daughter at a makeshift daycare in her own humble part of town. These snapshots into the afterlives of dislocated women and the wary nature of their assimilation into urban society could use far more room to breathe. But onwards the film goes, winding back up the mountain where Aeva searches for Yak and says goodbye to her now-decimated village through a series of long, mournful takes.
And as Aroonpheng spins his narrative into a long, misshapen web, the drama involving Yak vanishes behind a cloud of fog and transforms into the film’s most baffling yet bracing detour. The mystic whine of Christine Ott and Mathieu Gabry’s score carries us into a hidden world of ancient Thai deities living inside the mountain’s caves and tunnels. Bedazzled warriors cast in golden, soft-edged lighting glide around sultrily, until a tusked ogre slips away from his masters and (once more) we descend back to civilization. If the first round of assimilation escaped you, well, now we get it again in a more painful, supernatural register. It’s odd for a film that takes so many ambitious shots to keep making the same points; some fog-clearing, in this case, might have clarified the details.
