Mekong Hotel continues the unconventional experimentation and dreamlike artistry that has made Cannes-winning Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Syndromes and a Century, Tropical Malady, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) an essential figure in world cinema. The Mekong Hotel near the Thailand/Laos border provides the setting; Tong (Sakda Kaewattana) and Phon (Maiyatan Techaparn) ponder life, death and love in one “existence,” while Phon's mother's ghost haunts a room in another, occasionally even feasting on entrails. And in yet a third existence, the actor playing the ghost recounts her real-life memories of armed conflict in the region during the 1960s and 1970s. Through it all, the Mekong River continues to float by, bloated by the floods of 2011.

Merging documentary and fiction and the everyday and the supernatural, with onscreen characters shifting between their “otherworldly” and “real” selves, Mekong Hotel is an enigmatic, magical portrait of a hotel, a region, and a nation. Weerasethakul has already secured his standing as an art-cinema behemoth; Mekong Hotel extends his creative reach into an even more promising future.