Tropical Malady

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Tom F As an aspiring film snob I appreciate what they are going for, but it never fully clicked for me. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 04/19/24 Full Review Yellowfur D The environment in the first half is very noisy, and the footage is a bit fragmented. If "Memoria" is an experimental concert, the first half of "Tropical Malady" is like a Northeastern stew. In the second half of the story about the tiger, the director's personal style gradually emerged, with mystical stories, illustrations, and narration, but there was a bit too much explanation. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/02/24 Full Review Ekaterina P With a genuine excitement about a movie hailed as a striking and engrossing experience, not least in the LGBTQIA+ genre, I was ultimately let down by the filmmaking itself. Even if the idea might have been fine, the two halves of the movie were difficult to reconcile. I also found the sound design and mixing to be on the lower end - you could barely hear the dialogue, and most of the sound was pretty much just crickets chirping. Of course, this adds to the overall ambiance of the jungle depicted so heavily in the movie but I missed an even slightly more crisp experience. However, the love story was refreshingly unproblematic and undramatic to me. Usually, we have to deal with quite a lot of intensity when watching an LGBTQIA+ work of art, but in this case, it went by mildly like a gentle spring breeze. You might say that the dramatic part of the story unfolds in the second, feverish part of the film, but it doesn't hit you over the head with a dark thematic. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2004, but I doubt that this has withstood the test of time. The film doesn't require much from its audience, but it is choppy and uncomfortable at best. Rated 1.5/5 Stars •  Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 09/28/23 Full Review Taylor L Just your average romance told via a hunter staring down a phantom tiger. Yet another slow-burn, minimalist, highly allegorical drama that has received global acclaim... that I didn't really connect to. There's a threshold where avant-garde crosses into pointless pretentiousness for me, and this film is clearly well past it, with its very sensory tale of love heavily infused with influences of the natural world. Very prominently mixes reality with the supernatural and dreamlike. The first part of this film is actually quite appealing, a homosexual love story that has sparing dialogue and uses inching emotional resonance, where characters develop familiarity based around just more or less existing in close proximity to one another. But the second part, where the relationship is completely altered to embrace a bit of legendary folklore, fell completely flat for me; at one point I might have sat in awe at the pieces I didn't understand and think about how it must have been my own shortcomings that left me in the dark, and applaud without comprehending. Now, I just accept that there are attributes of films that don't hit the mark for me, such as the slow-burning parallels between obsession and nature's yearning that Apichatpong Weerasethakul has crafted. (3/5) Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 01/06/23 Full Review Audience Member The movie is about losing your love and can't let it go. Your emptiness of lost love grows so big and strong, it is like a tiger, beautiful and destructive. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/27/23 Full Review Audience Member The film is a fascinating enigma of the mind and the human heart that leaves one both euphoric and reflective, whether you choose to see its narrative as fractured or beautifully original. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/17/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Tropical Malady

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