Kra­bi, 2562

What year is it? In this stim­u­lat­ing, col­lab­o­ra­tive work by film­mak­ers Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichako­rn­pong, it ini­tial­ly seems like the present day, as we fol­low a seri­ous-mind­ed loca­tion scout as she wan­ders the sun-bleached shores and shrines of what appears as con­tem­po­rary-era Kra­bi – a South­ern Thai tourist hotspot.

Yet that doesn’t explain the reg­u­lar appear­ances of a pre­his­toric, cave-dwelling two­some decked out in tat­ty ani­mal furs and occa­sion­al­ly ter­ror­is­ing those who hov­er too close to their rocky abode. Nor would it cov­er the emo­tion­al­ly raw trip to a shut­tered open air cin­e­ma whose long-serv­ing jan­i­tor bears wit­ness to a strange miracle.

If time is a flu­id con­cept, then this film is a sweet, mul­ti-coloured cock­tail with a paper umbrel­la lean­ing on the rim of the glass. It’s not so much that each cut of the film trans­ports us to a new time and place, it’s that mul­ti­ple eras and loca­tions inter­min­gle in the frame con­cur­rent­ly. It takes a lit­tle get­ting used to, but this drift­ing affect lends the sounds and images a serene, almost ther­a­peu­tic quality.

Rivers has long been inter­est­ed in the con­cept of decay, and also in sto­ries which exist out­side of an iden­ti­fi­able moment, although this per­haps isn’t instant­ly iden­ti­fi­able as his work. The warm 16mm pho­tog­ra­phy cap­tures kitsch, weath­er-dam­aged arte­facts and a land­scape that remains untouched by modernism.

A sense of com­ic intrigue per­vades, even though it’s nev­er cer­tain if any of the var­i­ous strands (which also includes the hokey pro­duc­tion of a TV ad involv­ing an actor play­ing a cave­man pad­dling in the sea) will amount to any­thing more than casu­al­ly mean­der­ing vignettes.

There’s so much going on, and new char­ac­ters appear in most scenes, that as plea­sur­able as it all is, it’s very tough to say with even a scin­til­la of cer­tain­ty what any of it adds up to. But that’s nev­er the worst thing for a film like this.