Ploy

very strange movie. boring in the beginning. lots of questions in the end. not my kind of movie...

A slight letdown. It's a chilly moody drama punctuated by occasional moments of suspense. But the end result is that it doesn't seem to know what it is, and doesn't measure up to either of those films. There is an attractive ambiguity that leaves many questions unanswered... unfortunately one of them is "did I miss the point, or was there none?". There ought to be a little more meat on these bones. Well-produced with a few interesting ideas and worthwhile moments, it just left me a little empty.

Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's tendency for weak endings (a trait of each of his films that i've seen) here really hurts what could have otherwise been my favorite film of his, even if it does also (perhaps knowingly) steal a central motif from Chungking Express (maybe a nod to it's obvious target audience?). Aesthetically it's brilliant, on par with the likes of Claire Denis (in a way it's not unlike her Trouble Every Day sans the horror aspect). But oh man, the last twenty minutes really throw it off...