Apichatpong Weera-sethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives takes place in the same existential twilight as James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. The essential sentence of that novel,“It darkles (tinct, tint) all this our funnanimal world,” captures the essence of this slow and numinous movie. Set in the jungles of Thailand, it concerns the death of a photographer. As he enters, by way of kidney failure, the last part of his life, memories, ghosts, and monsters of the past begin to surround him. The monsters are covered in black hair and have eyes that are red like the Cylons’ eyes in the original Battlestar Galactica. The ghosts and the monsters surprise the living people, but they don’t scare them. These apparitions are who we are—the recent and distant dead. This film, which won the 2010 Palme d’Or at Cannes, will leave a vivid impression on your imagination.