Film

Set in a Thai ghost town still recovering from the region’s 2004 tsunami, Aditya Assarat’s romantic drama plays out its courtship rituals against a ravaged coastal landscape: Deserted residences, empty beaches and gutted buildings haunt every brief encounter. A corporate resort is being constructed in the former vacation destination, and the company’s Bangkok-based architect (Kansen) arrives to chart the project’s progress. The urban dweller checks into a ramshackle motel owned by a young, mousy woman (Saisoontorn). He flirts with her while she hangs laundry; she sneaks into his room to caress the bedsheets. They drift into a tentative relationship (everything in the film happens at drifting speed), though as it has on their environment, the past has left its scars. And similar to their backwoods American counterparts, these rural locals don’t take kindly to strangers in their midst.

Both the languid pace and fixation on pastoral vistas suggest the director’s kinship with fellow countryman Apichatpong Weerasethakul, while the keen attention paid to architecture hints at an Antonioni obsession. The lyrical manner in which Wonderful Town introduces a third-act shift into B-movie territory, however, is Assarat’s alone; his raw, poetic sensibility turns this posttraumatic parable into something both dreamy and oddly disturbing.