Asylum

How do the two halves connect? Still, lulling, and pleasurably levitated as it may be, the first section is hardly straightforward or even explicable—right from the uneasy opening scene, in which an army troop cheerfully poses for photos with a dead body. Incidental mysteries pile up. Some are casually explained (why Tong, the civilian, sometimes dresses in military uniform), but most linger as gentle bafflements. Malady promotes new ways of seeing; what's more, it's a film that looks back at you. The characters have a habit of staring into the camera—a gesture that usually signifies complicity, though the effect is vaguely discomfiting here, since we're not sure what we're complicit in.

Keng and Tong's romance may be coy and tentative, but I can't think of another movie that depicts a same-sex relationship with such lovely matter-of-factness. They share an easy intimacy that grows increasingly erotic—entwining limbs in a movie theater and, in a startling scene that prefigures the imminent reversion to the animal state, submitting a possibly urine-stained hand to a taste test.

Colm Hogan

Richardson saves the last dance for Csokas in Asylum.

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If Malady's first half is a sunny utopia clouded by intimations of disquiet (like the detour to an underground temple), the second, jungle half is about getting used to—or giving in to—the unbearable night. Like fearful, trembling Keng, the viewer is often stranded in blackness (and when your eyes adjust, what you see can be a shock). The rupture transmigrates the narrative into a mystical realm, but it's unclear if Keng and Tong have been banished or elevated to this plane of existence. Was their love too intense for the material world? Does the fulfillment of animal hungers require the cover of darkness? The film's mysteries are so cosmic that any attempt to ascribe allegory can seem puny. (NR) DENNIS LIM