As an aspiring film snob I appreciate what they are going for, but it never fully clicked for me.

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.

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.

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)

This movie gives me hope.

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.

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.

Unusual film by an unusual filmmaker is a bit rambling.

Fascinating and oddly touching experimental film that follows the story of desire and love between two Thai men. One of these men seems eager and fully embrace his sexuality while the other fights this desire out of fear. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film then cleverly shits gears from realism to a culturally inspired twist into the surreal. It stands alone as one of the more interesting and potent International films to deal with the issue of societal pressure and dangers of being opening gay.

It's an experience that touches all senses with its vivid presentation of life and love. It pushes you to explore not just what is hidden underneath the surface of Weerasethakul's world but also your own. It gives you the time and space to do so.

Apichatpong submerges in the hypnotic nature of the mundane so we can fully appreciate and feel the transcendental. The awkwardly tender love story between a soldier and a farmer in the Thai tropical rainforest we see for the first hour is then re-contextualized as a mystical exploration of love and desire as animal instincts. His style is subdued but still pretty much present, emphasizing only in the ethereal sense of atmosphere and light surrealism, and letting the emotional core guide us through this deeply enthralling spiritual experience.

An experimental and avant-garde film, no doubt, but a beautiful, tender, and hypnotic work of poetry. The second half of this film is the most beautiful of nightmares while the first is a truly tender love story between two men. By film's end, I was raptured into it's hypnotic groove. Films like this are few and very far between.

Weerasethakul continues his status as probably the most enigmatic filmmaker in the world. His movies are frustrating, beautiful, experimental, and a about a million other different words. Tropical Malady is basically a movie in two parts. The first part is a fairly straightforward love story between two men, and the second part puts the same two actors into different roles as a soldier lost in the woods hunting for a shape shifting wild man. I totally understand why this movie was booed on it's initial release, but I also see why it's come to a higher understanding in recent years. I wouldn't recommend this to most people because it can be incredibly slow paced at times and it's borderline pretentious, but it never jumps into ridiculous art house cliches and maintains a subtle fantasy/dreamscape throughout. Fans of the directors other work should check it out!

A dreamily disjointed film that goes from the homosexual courtship of a young country boy by a young male soldier to the tale of the hunting down of a shape shifting ghost. It is this inconsistency that gives this Thai film its chief appeal, making it feel like a lucid dream, defying conventions and being fearlessly mystifying to the point where it may test the patience of some viewers, but on the other hand seem rewarding to anyone willing to follow its elusiveness.

The film evolves into something deeper, a story about the atavistic wildness within people.

effective and affecting film-making . the second half plunges the first into a provocative posthumanist resonance. It's a wonderfully made and performed hinged narrative; genuinely suspenseful and beguiling.

Difficult to watch and very slow-moving. Although admittedly quite raw and beautiful in many small parts.

Deliberately staged and shot, Tropical Malady does amazing things with its budget to tell a visual story. But there are enough missteps and clunky sequences to noticeably detract from its attempt at visual poetry. Still it's worth your while.

This film is really difficult to judge. It's so slow and difficult to watch, and it's not that it's even rewarding when you're all said and done with it. But there are such moments of pure brilliance alongside some of the most gorgeous cinematography I've ever seen, especially in the second half. How do you approach this? It's tough; it's not my thing; it's really good; it's unique.

Meditative. Strange. Kind of cool but somehow not thrilling enough.