Winding down from the ecstatic high-notes of Linda Linda Linda, Nobuhiro Yamashita renews his fascination with social misfits in this quasi-Fargo affair involving a hit-and-run victim, a decapitated head, blackmail, rat poison, gold bullion, and backwater sexual mores. Clearly there’s something in Matsugane’s H20, a snow-covered provincial town whose local hairdresser pimps out her pregnant daughter to customers, and where a dead body on the side of the road is an opportunity for a feel-up. Meanwhile, two lowlife criminals coerce the twin brother of a police officer into helping them retrieve something valuable from beneath a frozen lake. Unlike previous outings, Yamashita’s deadpan manoeuvrings don’t quite achieve the same comic abruptness, but the situations are just as awkward, the mood as always unpredictable, and the spare and observant humour resoundingly unconventional.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s most breathtaking film to date is a striking tableaux of virtually motionless interior setups that gleam with the visual authority of Asian contemporaries Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien. And while Apichatpong may still be an apprentice next to those two Taiwanese masters, Syndromes and a Century is clearly the work of a graduate; a singular, spellbinding duplex of urban and tropical harmonies that merge, conflict, and eventually become one in what can be considered the Thai director’s most accessible film thus far (relatively speaking, of course). Folded in two halves, Weerasethakul observes the daily routine of a rural hospital on the fringes of Thailand’s luscious jungle overgrowth (bridged by one exquisite, searching tracking shot), only to double around and reboot the narrative from its very beginning, albeit in a more sterile, urbanised setting. To make sense of it all seems beside the point when sound, image, and an intangible quality I can only describe as an aura, are made to converge with such miraculous synchronicity. Like anything by David Lynch, the recommended approach is to lean back, relinquish all control, and absorb the film into your pores. Yet rather than leave the viewer with an infuriating headache, Weerasethakul fills his timescape with moments and memories of bliss and transcendence – bound to produce a smile, if not a refreshed appreciation of cinema’s possible worlds.—Tim Wong