On the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and what slow cinema becomes in a Buddhist cultural context.

Weerasethakul is a Thai director whose films — Tropical Malady, Syndromes and a Century, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives — operate within a formal tradition of slow cinema but with a spiritual context that significantly changes what the slowness is for.

In European slow cinema, the slowness tends to be about secular phenomenology: the experience of time passing, the materiality of the world, the complexity of perception. In Weerasethakul's films, the slowness opens space for the supernatural: the films move at a pace that allows ghosts to be present, that allows the boundary between the living and the dead to be permeable.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is the film where this quality is most developed: a dying man is visited by the ghosts of his dead wife and his son who has transformed into a jungle spirit. The film treats these visitations with the same quality of attention it gives to the mundane conversations around the dinner table. The supernatural and the natural coexist at the same visual and temporal register.

This is a specifically Buddhist phenomenology, not a Western horror convention. The spirits are not threatening. They are continuations.