When I watched Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives for the second time, I’ve been manifesting a sudden and irreversible metamorphosis into a domestic water buffalo. If I tap the correct vertebrae in my spinal column, I suspect I could reverse the Antarctic trauma of my proto-human ancestors and begin to graze on grass and roughage instead of rice and fried eggs.  

Though Uncle Boonmee is anti-narrative for the most part — lacking a solid, central line of reasoning or action to follow — there is one central plot point: Uncle Boonmee is dying, and his extended family has come to visit his tamarind plantation, but that’s secondary to the narrative. 

The movie is more so an accumulation of memories that traces itself into that blue vegetation of one of the film’s important incarnations, the water buffalo — or my own spinal surrogate. It’s beautifully shot, with meditative dynamics of light contrasted against sharp colours, making every frame a murmur of memory and transition. 

Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul generates intense cinematic presence from even a cheap Sasquatch costume by carefully positioning it at softened and incorporated angles, until the redness of the costume’s eyes are completely arresting.

In Uncle Boonmee, the audience faces the idea of transforming into an ‘other.’ More specifically, this is the infinite regress of thresholds in the anonymous transition from son into monkey spirit or deceased wife into a semi-translucent superimposition. 

All of this Weerasethakul conveys through the tricks of anti-narrative, by which I mean non-visual suggestions made through offsets in the sequence of shots. The film creates a coexistence of many fuzzy memories from which images of the past are being recollected. These clumps of the past are then collapsed into the present moment, the film’s starting point. It’s a seriously non-linear movement. 

Our adult spinal cords have 24 vertebrae, while a water buffalo has 49–51. These vertebrae carry an evolutionary memory — a reptilian mind in the back of our brain that is pushed deeper into the smallest parts of us.  We can still see this base part of our mind when we sleep. 

This baseness is a very useful vehicle for engaging with Uncle Boonmee, a movie I’ve never finished without half-dozing off into the bendiness of its presentation. It might sound like a particularly difficult movie to understand, but it’s actually a pretty viewer-centric experience, with lots of leeway in the construction of the film’s true meaning —  the metamorphosis of all that raw material into the ambiguous image of the water buffalo.

Besides the liberal interpretations of the narrative, Uncle Boonmee is about connectivity in the way our brains make connections and form memories. These are presented through seemingly disconnected shots; our neural pathways generate into dream trees, which widen with the discontinuity between shots. Your spinal cord is not only for standing you upright, but it also aids in the body’s sensation. Though the spinal cord’s dorsal horns are located in the posterior regions, they are as equally involved in sensation as the body’s higher cerebral centres. In becoming a water buffalo, there’s a larger intuitive logic invisibly coordinating each of these segments in a spinal cord. Movies can work in an analogous manner.

Like your spinal cord, cinema is the ossification of many disjointed memories. Think about it this way: your upright posture is a direct recollection of the Cambrian explosion, the moment a sea anemone decided to have back pain rather than perfect symmetry. I’m suggesting that you watch Uncle Boonmee along similar terms. 

Near the end of Uncle Boonmee, the titular character’s nephew experiences himself stationary, watching television while simultaneously leaving his hotel room with his mother. This doubling of the present moment is the spinal cord. 

When we take up the baggage of our skin, flesh, bones, and marrow, we have lots of leeway in constructing meaning and our enjoyment of freedom. Our understanding of memory is immediate and flexible. You could always just be a water buffalo instead and transcend the porous border between your human, animal, and ghostly existence.

That is to say, you already understand Uncle Boonmee perfectly well. Your singular experience — the perspective of this moment as it is right now, and its integration into your knowledge during that moment is the self-expression of a complete appreciation for all film and its intricacies. I guess you could substitute ‘cinema’ in that last sentence for something less meaningful, like ‘life’, ‘love’, ‘intrinsic buddha-nature’, or whatever. The point is, this movie is really quite good and approachable. You should watch it while you fall asleep.