Rewatched 28th March 2025
Director: Apichatpong
Weerasethakul
Screenplay: Apichatpong
Weerasethakul
Cast: Jenjira Pongpas, Sakda
Kaewbuadee, Chai Bhatana and Maiyatan Techaparn
Damn, I forgot my own tune.
A film I've wanted to see for a long time, and not readily available, Mekong Hotel had a disadvantage of being less than an hour long, and that this was the follow up to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). The hype after Uncle Boonmee... won at the Cannes Film Festival its most prestigious award, the Palme D'or, may have been a disadvantage when this premiered at the festival in 2012, a work less structured on plot.
There's a weight knowing how the Mekong River in the north-east of Thailand, where this is set, has a lot of meaning for its director-writer. Set at a hotel by a river that is the border between Thailand and Laos, in real life his father's ashes were scattered there, gaining a greater significance for him1. You could argue Mekong Hotel is a very opaque film even for its creator, as with everything by Weerasethakul, defying expectations even for those who would've grasped his style previously. It starts from the get-go, opening with a conversation between two men without the first images seen, one a classical guitarist, Chai Bhatana, who provides the score. The first images seen are the titular hotel on the Mekong River, with the lush acoustic guitar music setting up the tropical atmosphere, guiding us through a series of conversations with the local denizens occupying the hotel.
Among them is the other idiosyncratic touch, with regular collaborators Jenjira Pongpas and Sakda Kaewbuadee involved in the cast, where there are phi pop spirits from Thai folklore. The first is introduced undercutting the tranquillity of a debate by one man of what clothes to wear, a woman just outside the rooms consuming bloodied raw meat. Mekong Hotel has been dubbed a drama and a documentary, but as with all of Weerasethakul's films, genre tags are a vague concept especially as the phi pop spirits are very important to the content here. The first is seen having killed and eaten the viscera of someone's beloved dog, but they are also cannibalistic. The touch here that you would only get from Weerasethakul, whose take on the supernatural has always been one of his most compelling touches, is that we get to see from their side too. We are able to hear from the pop's side of things especially when one is revealed to be someone's mother, having intimate conversations, knitting and apologising to her adult daughter for who she now is. In legend, they are said to possess their victims and, when they have made them hunt for raw meat, eventually eat their own intestines before moving on; we see in this one of the male cast being possessed by the phi pop at one point only to be exorcised. They are still in the consciousness in their homeland, with adaptations of the legends in the likes of Pob Pee Fa (2009), a TV series, and it is befitting that Weerasethakul would take these figures for Mekong Hotel and deal with them in a more humane banality.
They still kill people, but we also see from their sides their regrets of their immortality mixed with the hunger. Naturally, as with Uncle Boonmee... its matter of fact as that film dealt with someone's reincarnations returning to his memory, of the moment in Tropical Malady (2004) that stayed with me of a cow accidentally being shot but its ghost happily wandering off immediately in peace. Weerasethakul views the supernatural if it exists with this casualness of the ghosts merely intermingling with the daily lives of those also at this hotel, from the lovers, the friends, those with pasts involving the history of military action in the country of Thailand, and the pervading fear of flooding. Ghosts devouring peoples' guts is one thing, which happens here, but more ominous in tone is when the characters talk of how they need to be prepared for potential flooding in the area, reflecting how as we see in the distance excavators doing their work, the landscape by human and accidental influence in modernisation may influence the natural landscape too.
A big factor to Mekong Hotel, making it a shame it is not readily available, is that this is quite important for Apichatpong Weerasethakul as a film maker. He made a film in digital also dying for a proper available release - the co-directed comedy-spy farce The Adventure of Iron Pussy (2003) made with Michael Shaowanasai I've always wanted to see. Here however marks the point he entirely moved to digital between 16mm celluloid in Uncle Boonmee to digital cinematography in Cemetery of Splendour (2015). This is a film which Weerasethakul shot, edited, directed and produced by himself to save costs, alongside a small budget financed by UK-based production company Illuminations Films1. Also among the producers is Keith Griffiths, one of the most important British producers to exist for me, for how much he has contributed in helping some of the most interesting filmmakers to exist. He is arguably someone I should lionise as he has helped figures I adore - stop motion animators Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers, Apichatpong Weerasethakul - alongside his collaborations with the likes of Christopher Petit and Patrick Keiller, two really idiosyncratic British filmmakers, and his one-offs like Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) and Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio (2012). He deserves so much credit for making cinema far more interesting just for these examples.
The intimacy this small budget and production explains, and adds greater reward, to Mekong Hotel's intimacy. It is an opaque film but not a difficult film in terms of plot because, arguably, there is no plot. It is a string of interactions where we get into the lives of these figures, and the ghosts too, ruminating on their lives. Slow content guitar over conversations is apparently my jam, even when it keeps playing nonchalantly over a pop ghost eating someone's entrails on a hotel bed, but you can miss without sufficient cultural knowledge of Thai history some of its more striking pieces of dialogue. One female character openly talks about being taught by the military soldiers how to use a rifle and be militarized, something viewed by her as fun and matter-of-fact of an ordinary life despite being unordinary out of context. The ghost of combat is here, and still was in-between the filming of Mekong Hotel, as between this film and Uncle Boonmee you had the 2010 military crackdown on Red Shirt protestors and the 2014 military coup transpire in Thailand. Details could be dismissed, as unfortunately might have been the case to critics at the Cannes Film Festival premiere, that ask so many questions especially if you are entirely unaware of Thai history but register this, from the detail from the same female character of having dated a US soldier stationed there, and to the nod to the Mekong River being a border to Laos of Laosian migrants entering the country. There's a sobering moment discussing this, where Laotian migrants had such difficulty in living in Thailand as documented in one scene, which becomes more meaning when migrants are still a discussion today.
Some harmony is however found within Mekong Hotel. The landscape is still beautiful despite the excavation in the distance. Friendships and bonding between ghost mother and daughter transpires. There is a machine, predating what you have in Cemetery of Splendour, which lets one leave their body as a spirit explore, looking like a VR headset with the humour that the out-of-body experience is only undercut by how much battery power there is. A ghost can still live, still knit, if locked to a hotel room or so for six hundred years and needing to feed a craving for flesh. Then there is the final scene, a prologue shot of the river with jet skis in the distance which feels closer to Weerasethakul's installation projects if with the sense of tranquillity felt from sitting and contemplating the environment that is close to Apichatpong Weerasethakul for emotional weight. As well, for an underrated film in his filmography, there's also the base pleasure of just watching people having fun on jet skis, a reminder that a lot of my appreciation of his films is as much for this sense of tranquillity that permeates all of his work too.
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1) His Particle, Somewhere: Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012), written by Duncan Caillard for Sense of Cinema, and published June 2021.
