SnakesOnAnAfricanPlain The wrong film at the wrong time. So my expectations are slightly to blame, having read it was a drama/fantasy, I thought it would be a nice film for a Sunday morning. How wrong I was! The fantasy is very light, and could just be described as weird. It all starts fantastically enough with an amazing shot. The camera pans through a woodland as though itis searching for a story to tell. It soon comes across two men chasing a woman. We then hear breathing and realise this shot is the perspective of someone/something. It seems to ignore the events and soon rises higher and higher, making it obvious this is no human. As it looks down we see the two men, dead, in a river. This one shot contains more excitement, thought, and technical brilliance than the remainder of the running time. Nymph forces you to suffer through endless glaring at trees and shots of people with flashlights gradually turning around. It's a painfully tame and tedious film.

p-stepien In a beautiful and riveting opening sequence set in the midst of a Thai rain-forest we are thrust straight into the overall tone of the movie. The whole six minute scene is made in one take, where the camera is seemingly detached from the action and only stumbles upon it from time to time capturing a rape scene and several minutes later the perpetrators are lying dead in the water.From this we are transported into the lives of a town-dwelling marriage of well-off professionals May and Nop. As in the opening sequence there lives are detached from each other only occasionally touching each other as if almost by chance. Nop is engulfed in his photography as a means to escape his failing marriage, whilst May finds solace in the arms of her coworker Korn. Without much enthusiasm May and Nop plan an escape into the wilderness and go camping in the forest. Even here in the midst of nature and cut off from other companionship they hardly intertwine and seem to exist separately. Until one night Nop wanders off in the forest only to disappear...Extremely consistent in eeriness it captivates the senses. Much thanks to the camera-work, which is terrific and beautiful stuff, albeit most of it is made with a hand-held camera making it almost reminiscent of "Blair Witch Project" (albeit with way better results). Given that this movie almost watches like a horror film it must be noted, that it is much more than just a typical genre movie. It remains creepy throughout shying away however from actually being a shock thriller or Asian horror.The ending leaves much unexplained and it would probably help a lot to be better acquainted with local mythology. Without it you can assume various plot points, but are ultimately left with many questions unanswered that seem solely cultural. Additionally the version I saw seemed to be missing a significant portion of the last 30 or so minutes and various situations seemed to have not been filmed or cut out. That said the version I watched lasted 93 minutes, while IMDb gives the Cannes copy a 109 minute runtime.All in all I found movie captivating and inspiring, although somewhat slow and drags on unnecessarily at times. The ending is not entirely satisfactory and slightly bland, but I admittedly preferred that it left so much to self-interpretation. Made a significant enough impression on me to search out other Pen-Ek Ratanaruang movies and note him down as an auteur filmmaker.

Jonas SPOILER WARNING!It is somewhat trendy these days to be 'sustainable' and 'emission free'. Ratanaruang caught this topic very well and expressed in 'Nang Mai' impersonalizing nature into a pretty young lady (the super-hot Thai actress Porntip Papanai) who suffers from the evil humans. The impersonalization is a little vague and incomplete yet the message is clear: do not hurt the nature or it will come back to you. Those who remember Pen-ek's movie 6sixtynin9 probably remember the moment where the girl gets attacked in her apartment by the gangsters and the TV is swhiched on showing some fellow talking about how important it is to "stop cutting down trees...". I believe the topic is not accidental and Mr. Ratanaruang must be a strong supporter of environmentalists which he wanted to express in his movie. My respect for that. We must protect our nature and understand the broader impact of that. I feel sorry for those who didn't quite get it and thought this was an 'ordinary' horror movie. It's not a horror movie and it's not intended to be so.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx I spent a lot of my childhood poring over classical mythology, to a nerdish extent. So nymphs of all sorts are very interesting to me, one of my favourite paintings is John William Waterhouse's Hylas and The Nymphs, I find myself thinking of it when I'm in the dentist's chair, a happy place to go to! I've also become acquainted with the darker side of the tradition as an adult, for example Ezra Pound's poem April.Simply put, this film should have been right up my street. The opening scene of the film indeed was very interesting, something I enjoyed a lot. There's a scene in Philippe Garrel's experimental movie Le révélateur where the characters are fleeing across a landscape and the camera separates and meets back up with them later on in the scene. It reminds me of ice dancing, where the couple who are skating split and rejoin. That's how the first scene of Nymph works in cinematographic terms, where here the eerie Thai forest is the landscape. So that's a success.From there on the movie unfortunately went downhill. The couple in this film, Nop and May are completely flat-lining in terms of interest, they flop through the movie as if they've just awoken from a coma. We don't get any sort of sense of why they are attracted to each other, the acting is not expressive at all, the film unfortunately becomes boring.I'm worried about the level of control Ratanaruang had on this movie, because it seems to fall into fairly boring and generic horror movie tropes, and I find it hard to believe that he's done that on purpose. I felt almost like I'd watched Ring 3 by the end of it such were the boredom levels with such a tired and clichéd movie.The secrecy and furtiveness with which the nymph was filmed were (a flash in the corner of the eye now and then at the start), in my opinion, totally unnecessary, worn out stuff that you could see in Blair Witch Project, or really any generic horror movie.I felt that there was enough good material here to edit into a highly successful short. But no way was there enough for a feature film. The ending, painfully, was really rather silly.