Summary
A hypnotic and meditative journey that uses four decades of political turmoil as the backdrop for a more familial tragedy in this strikingly visually led debut.
From the opening frames of Taiki Sakpisit’s debut feature, it’s like he wants to keep you at arm’s length. The director of the short films The Mental Traveller and The Age of Anxiety combines his thematic meditations on time and Thailand’s history, creating something that is at once hallucinatory and starkly nightmarish.
Opening in 2006, THE EDGE OF DAYBREAK is ostensibly about politician Parl spending one last night in a safehouse before the brewing political tension of Bangkok force him into exile.
Of course, even finding your way to this notion is a prima facie mystery. As an anonymous narrator informs us that ‘it was a full moon on the night Ploy drowned,’ cinematographer Chananun Chotrungroj’s unflinching lens drifts over and underground. It’s lit by torches, spotted with debris, and a naked body lies bruised on the ground.
The gloriously high contrast black and white photography becomes voyeuristic. A woman is ushered into a house to share a meal that is staged like the biblical last supper. It takes a full 15 minutes before the first piece of murderous dialogue is whispered.
Filled with abstract monochromatic imagery, sparse dialogue and obfuscated meaning attached to each scene, Sakpisit manages to convey a perpetual sense of dread through a brooding score and the unshakable feeling that the other shoe is about to drop. There is nothing on screen that isn’t deliberately in its place, from a snake in a pot to a swirling morass of inky liquid, or the woman who almost seems to break the fourth wall during a tender sex scene.
So, what to make of all this? You can take it as a rumination on a family trapped inside loss, guilt, grief and a fall from grace against four decades of turmoil. You might see it as the dreams of a girl in a coma from a near drowning. Or you can simply accept it as abstraction and it just is.
Whether you err on the side of hypnotic or tedious, Sakpisit’s film is unmistakably present. Like countryman Phuttiphong Aroonpheng (Manta Ray) or India’s Anshul Chauhan (Kontora), Sakpisit demonstrates an innate knack for bringing the inner world to visual life.
THE EDGE OF DAYBREAK plays on demand 50th-anniversary edition of IFFR. The festival runs from 1 – 7 February 2021 on the IFFR.com platform. Check out the website for screening details.
2021 | Thailand, Switzerland | DIRECTOR: Taiki Sakpisit | WRITER: Taiki Sakpisit | CAST: Manatsanun Panlertwongskul, Chalad Na Songkhla, Sunida Ratanakorn | DISTRIBUTOR: 185 Films, International Film Festival Rotterdam| RUNNING TIME: 114 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 2-5 February 2021 (NL)
