Nymph (2009)

Best movie of this year hands down!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The wrong film at the wrong time. So my expectations are slightly to blame, having read it was a drama/fantasy, I thought it would be a nice film for a Sunday morning. How wrong I was! The fantasy is very light, and could just be described as weird. It all starts fantastically enough with an amazing shot. The camera pans through a woodland as though itis searching for a story to tell. It soon comes across two men chasing a woman. We then hear breathing and realise this shot is the perspective of someone/something. It seems to ignore the events and soon rises higher and higher, making it obvious this is no human. As it looks down we see the two men, dead, in a river. This one shot contains more excitement, thought, and technical brilliance than the remainder of the running time. Nymph forces you to suffer through endless glaring at trees and shots of people with flashlights gradually turning around. It's a painfully tame and tedious film.

In a beautiful and riveting opening sequence set in the midst of a Thai rain-forest we are thrust straight into the overall tone of the movie. The whole six minute scene is made in one take, where the camera is seemingly detached from the action and only stumbles upon it from time to time capturing a rape scene and several minutes later the perpetrators are lying dead in the water.From this we are transported into the lives of a town-dwelling marriage of well-off professionals May and Nop. As in the opening sequence there lives are detached from each other only occasionally touching each other as if almost by chance. Nop is engulfed in his photography as a means to escape his failing marriage, whilst May finds solace in the arms of her coworker Korn. Without much enthusiasm May and Nop plan an escape into the wilderness and go camping in the forest. Even here in the midst of nature and cut off from other companionship they hardly intertwine and seem to exist separately. Until one night Nop wanders off in the forest only to disappear...Extremely consistent in eeriness it captivates the senses. Much thanks to the camera-work, which is terrific and beautiful stuff, albeit most of it is made with a hand-held camera making it almost reminiscent of "Blair Witch Project" (albeit with way better results). Given that this movie almost watches like a horror film it must be noted, that it is much more than just a typical genre movie. It remains creepy throughout shying away however from actually being a shock thriller or Asian horror.The ending leaves much unexplained and it would probably help a lot to be better acquainted with local mythology. Without it you can assume various plot points, but are ultimately left with many questions unanswered that seem solely cultural. Additionally the version I saw seemed to be missing a significant portion of the last 30 or so minutes and various situations seemed to have not been filmed or cut out. That said the version I watched lasted 93 minutes, while IMDb gives the Cannes copy a 109 minute runtime.All in all I found movie captivating and inspiring, although somewhat slow and drags on unnecessarily at times. The ending is not entirely satisfactory and slightly bland, but I admittedly preferred that it left so much to self-interpretation. Made a significant enough impression on me to search out other Pen-Ek Ratanaruang movies and note him down as an auteur filmmaker.

SPOILER WARNING!It is somewhat trendy these days to be 'sustainable' and 'emission free'. Ratanaruang caught this topic very well and expressed in 'Nang Mai' impersonalizing nature into a pretty young lady (the super-hot Thai actress Porntip Papanai) who suffers from the evil humans. The impersonalization is a little vague and incomplete yet the message is clear: do not hurt the nature or it will come back to you. Those who remember Pen-ek's movie 6sixtynin9 probably remember the moment where the girl gets attacked in her apartment by the gangsters and the TV is swhiched on showing some fellow talking about how important it is to "stop cutting down trees...". I believe the topic is not accidental and Mr. Ratanaruang must be a strong supporter of environmentalists which he wanted to express in his movie. My respect for that. We must protect our nature and understand the broader impact of that. I feel sorry for those who didn't quite get it and thought this was an 'ordinary' horror movie. It's not a horror movie and it's not intended to be so.

Nang Mai (or Nymph) wasted 2 hours of my life. The movie starts out with what feels like a 10 minute clip of some guy walking through a forest with a camera – okay I do admit I do feel the director putting a lot of effort into the scene, shooting the entire thing in one take… but obviously he's not going to repeat this first-person biology-watching nature trip again and again right? Turns out I was wrong. The entire movie more or less consists of a long and tedious trip through Thailand's wonderful forests! It looks and feels as though as Pen-Ek Ratanaruang has a man-crush on Stanley Kubrick and wants to come up with his own Thai version of the 2001 Space Odyssey, except with this one he'll shoot 80% of the movie in one day, having actors mindlessly walk around in circles in a forest then sticking bits in to create a ridiculous excuse of a plot! His forest scenes contained absolutely NO development and puts Andy Warhol's "Sleep" to shame -- the director is too busy striving to make a strange and unusual movie in hope of creating something "unique", that he forgot to make it actually watchable. The only enjoyment I got from this movie was the seemingly random sexual bits, and Cherry Berry.I felt cheated after walking out of the cinema and want my 150 baht and my 2 hours back… not mentioning how disturbingly misleading the preview was. If you felt cheated after watching this excuse of a movie like I did, you have my sympathies… if you have not seen this movie yet, then for the love of Pete don't make the same mistake that I did!