Samsara review – a playfully mysterious invitation to contemplate death

Lois Patiño’s film is a delicate, exotic contrivance, a docu-realist diptych spectacle using nonprofessional actors, about the Buddhist concept of “Samsara”, the cycle of birth, death and life, and the transmigration of souls. Set in Laos and Zanzibar, it is mysterious and quietist, but flavoured with something whimsical and even playful; it is one of those ostensibly serious films best appreciated with the sense of humour, which Graham Greene said was the only thing that allowed him to believe in God. An agnostic might find something a little preposterous, even condescending in it: is it addressed to actual audiences in Laos and Zanzibar, or is this a film by and for western cinephiles? Well, there is charm and ingenuous directness here, and perhaps the influence of Thai film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Related: ‘I will never forget this’: Samsara, the film you watch with your eyes shut

In Laos, an old woman called Mon lies dying; a young man called Amid reads to her from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and she gently tells him of her wish, that she might be reincarnated as an animal. This is not a spiritual demotion and it is only thought of as such because of the cruel way we treat animals. Presently, Mon dies and after travelling in the bardo, the intermediate state between death and rebirth, the old woman’s soul alights in Zanzibar where she is reincarnated as a goat called Neema.

Nor is that all. The film requires us to “watch” the film during this 10-minute intermediate limbo state between Laos and Zanzibar with shut eyes, registering the abstract washes and flashes of light and colour through closed eyelids. It is intriguing, though a little disconcerting, especially because it is not entirely clear when this section is over and you’re allowed to open your eyes again. You might compare this to being asked to listen to a certain stretch of new music with hands over your ears, impressionistically sensing muffled sound shapes. But the reverie you go into is pleasurable; I found myself remembering sunbathing as a child.

The theme of metempsychosis in this film has also been taken up, as it happens, by Lisandro Alonso in his oddity Eureka, though in that film the pivot from one soul-state to the other is more complex and he does not insist on the protagonists’ childlike state in the same way. There is always something interesting in a movie that asks its audience to consider the taboo subject of death, and without the traditional mood-accompaniments of sadness and acceptance. But the tone is always important. The Laotian boy Amid befriends local orange-clad monks and uses his boat to take a party of them to the Kuang Si waterfall, a place of great beauty and spiritual significance (though also an established tourist destination, which you wouldn’t quite realise from this). While there, one monk dreamily dozes off, awakens to find himself alone and, just for a second, Amid plays a good-natured prank on him – in a similar spirit, perhaps, to the “eyes wide shut” midsection or the film as a whole, which nonetheless searches for a glimpse of the sublime.

• Samsara is released on 26 January in UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema, with an Australia release to be confirmed