British filmmaker Ben Rivers returns with another creative experiment which defies easy categorization, this time in collaboration with Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong. The film is set in Krabi, a coastal town in Thailand, and in the Buddhist calendar year 2562 (the present year). Krabi, 2562 feels real much of the time, like fly-on-the-wall non-fiction, and it is described in the VIFF catalogue as “quasi-ethnography.” That’s not too far off, as it does seem to want to illuminate and understand something foreign.
The film begins with a long shot of school children reciting a pledge in their schoolyard, and singing the royal anthem. This feels like a documentary. A translator and tour guide helps a stylish woman check into a hotel and takes her to visit a famous local beach and cave, where she is scouting locations for a film. A crew adjusts lighting on a commercial shoot and the main actor stands knee-deep in the ocean, chatting with the wardrobe consultant who holds an umbrella to protect him from the sun. An old man sits in a doorway, recalling his glory days as a boxer. A sense of an opaque narrative structure begins to form, but the connection between these stories is never clear.
The narrative tension comes from the disappearance of the location scout. A few scenes suggest a forensic investigation (a microscope next to a severed finger, a hazmat team scouring an area) but the whereabouts of the location scout is unknown. A cinema caretaker reports showing her to the roof where she simply vanished. At the same time we see glimpses of a prehistoric couple living in a cave, fishing with spears and cooking over a flame. They are spotted by the Thai commercial actor but they are not strictly living in the present. Perhaps the location scout has also moved to a different temporal plane.
In Krabi, 2562 history and myth are overlapping, occupying the same space. Other reviews and descriptions of this film have suggested that it is primarily about the creation of tourist destinations, and the way stories and legends are crafted and adapted in order to attract visitors. Though the tour guide does help an American couple order some street food that will not be too spicy for them, and send them to the fertility cave shrine, the focus here is firmly on people tied to this place, not outsiders. The desk clerk at the hotel where the missing woman stayed describes her visions of ghosts and spirits; she is embarrassed and uneasy about her interaction with the mystical world. It seems clear that the film wants to make us think deeply about multiple levels of reality.
In tone the film was a little reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film in which the land is alive, beautiful but also malevolent and where people often act as if they are in dreams or moving cross time. In both films characters are drawn to deeper powers that they might not understand, and the history of a place has an animating power to direct events. There are no answers in this genuinely weird film, but the questions it poses are worthy of consideration.