By the Time It Gets Dark

It's a film, a rather gorgeous one, of glances and ephemera and delicate metaphors.

Anocha Suwichakornpong earnestly and ambitiously attempts to redefine cinema’s conventional grasp of consciousness.

Expanding her premise into a reflection on an artist's challenge in portraying reality, the director's By the Time It Gets Dark is a magical, melancholic ode to the intellectual's struggle against the forces of history.

If anything, this comes off as a bit of an imitation of Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul, yet without the presence of the supernatural that situates his films in something formally and culturally specific.

By the Time It Gets Dark jumps at first into an examination of Thailand’s repressed history of political violence and dictatorial control. But that initial pencil sketch of a thesis is soon shuffled away in favor of several other less-interesting story threads which add up to much less than the sum of their parts.

By the Time It Gets Dark has clearly been thought through, but it’s so cryptic that it cries out for, if not perfect explanations, perhaps footnotes. It’s so conceptual that it offers little for those not in sync.