Cemetery of Splendor-Review

by, Cameron Lui

This movie is basically two hours of soothing ocean sounds. If you are having some insomnia issues I recommend this movie. 

Basically, most of the audience walked out of the theater by the third act and the rest were bobbing their heads in and out of a mid-day nap. 

I proudly kept my eyes open to soak up the entire movie but for some reason the director decided to go nowhere with a premise that had a lot of potential. 

“Love in Khon Kaen tells of a lonesome middle-age housewife who tends a soldier with sleeping sickness and falls into a hallucination that triggers strange dreams, phantoms, and romance.”

The log line is amazing and some of the subtleties of the movie were interesting, but the movie just wandered around a tired topic. The intention of the director did seem to be to put the audience in an exhausted mind state to really feel the world they were living in, but I just can’t seem to find a proper excuse for neglecting to give the audience any substance to latch on to.

I did appreciate how the film paced itself intentionally and none of what made the movie boring was unintentional. Unfortunately, when you have a movie that is centered around dialog and subtly complicated philosophy, relying on subtitles takes away from the experience. 

The film has had terrific reviews thus far and there are many components that make it an interesting film but for the average movie-goer I would not recommend it.