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Audio Format: DD 5.1 Surround Video Format: Widescreen 1.77:1 (Anamorphic) Languages: Thai Subtitles: English Region Code: 3, PAL Year Made: 2004 Running Time: 114
Please note: Please verify that PAL formatted DVD will play on your machine prior to purchasing this title. (PAL TV and DVD players required.)
Winner - Jury Prize Cannes Film Festival 2004
 Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethaku makes experimental films outside that country's studio system. Rigorously uncommercial and for most viewers impenetrable, his second feature, "Tropical Malady," will prove a strain for even his loyal fans. Certainly for most audiences the viewing experience will prove not only tedious but bewildering. If the walkouts and boos mingled with applause at its press screening here mean anything, the film may stump the art-film crowd as well.
The film comes in two parts. In the first, a young soldier Keng (Banlop Lomnoi) falls for a country boy named Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee). They sit around with his Tong's mother, listening to the sounds of the night air. Away from his home, Keng kisses and fondles Tong's hand. (Whatever does that mean? one wonders.)
Then the screen goes blank and we are meant to understand that Tong has disappeared. Now we enter the folkloric section of the movie, in which the soldier enters the jungle looking for Tong or a ghost or a wild beast that is slaughtering cows. It is not clear.
 This section is shot at night in a jungle in northeast Thailand. This effectively keeps the screen nearly pitch black so one is lucky to see anything. The highlight comes when a monkey is glimpsed and his gibbering is given subtitled dialogue. Later a tiger appears, but isn't given anything to say.
Finally, a ghost appears in the form of a naked man who wrestles and apparently defeats the soldier. Hard to say though since this, too, takes place in the dark. Which is where Weerasethakul leaves his audience for most of the film.
Special Features:
- Audio Commentary with Director and Main Actors
- TV Scoops -Tropical Malady in Cannes
- TV Spot
- Trailer
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