Khun Phan (2016)

Letterboxd review from someone in a much better position to review this than me. https://letterboxd.com/beebom/film/khun-pan/

I'm honestly not sure what to make of this.

Legend writ enormously large around a real person who may not have contributed much, if anything, aside from his name, his job and the location.

A Thai take on westerns - like it belongs in the lineage of Tears of the Black Tiger, though not as far afield. Violent, very violent and very stylised, muted browns and dirt, the use of water. Parts felt almost surreal, which is one way of making supernatural powers real within a film, like this was just normal in their world, rare but known.

It was difficult and I took a few breaks, looking this or that thing up. It's like the opposite of the two hours + Thai movies I love, where they wander around exploring their wee world before revealing their poignancy and it's gentle and comforting. Only here it's the hour 38 minutes of a Thai action movie, traveling through the violence of its world. And then it shifts, surreal but grounded within the language of the film, and ends in something else. It gave some sense of meaning and closure, satisfying in the moment, but perhaps not all that deep. Exhausting to get there too. Maybe it felt worth it, in the end.

But there were clearly layers I do not have the knowledge to feel, even if I can think my way through some of them. Sometimes my sense of being an outsider is particularly sharp. This is one.

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