With its slow, pensive pace, maybe director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is telling us to slow down to life's natural rhythms to see the beauty and magic in the world, things often hidden to us because we're scurrying around in our busy/short lives or have our attention glued to a television or some other screen. A man is dying of kidney failure in Thailand and we see six scenes, a few of which seem like visions, and all of which are tinged with the surreal. Perhaps the connective thread is in the film's title, and he's simply recalling past lives as he lays dying in this one. Perhaps the film is saying that we are only conscious of a small fraction of the universe, that we are connected to everything around us and everything that has ever lived, that every living thing has a spirit and we reincarnate into a myriad possible forms, monkey ghosts and copulating fish included. It's all slyly ambiguous, but the sense of the spiritual is pervasive, like a poem that's hard to penetrate. Perhaps most telling is the moment he says "What's wrong with my eyes? They are open but I can't see. Or are my eyes closed?" Open your eyes, the film seems to be saying.
