Mysterious Object at Noon

The surrealist concept of the exquisite corpse game—where a story is improvised and continued from person to person—is reinvented along the roadside stops of rural Thailand in Weerasethakul’s astounding debut feature. A film crew heads from Bangkok to the hinterlands, asking people along the way to continue telling a tale of a wheelchair-bound boy; the story is shaped through speech or sign language, song and dance or radio broadcast, and grows more outlandish by the mile. “Less an anomaly than a secret skeleton key [to Weerasethakul’s work],” Dennis Lim wrote, “Mysterious Object at Noon revels in the myriad ways a story can be transmitted.”