Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

Admirable film.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

In a beautiful and riveting opening sequence set in the midst of a Thai rain-forest we are thrust straight into the overall tone of the movie. The whole six minute scene is made in one take, where the camera is seemingly detached from the action and only stumbles upon it from time to time capturing a rape scene and several minutes later the perpetrators are lying dead in the water.From this we are transported into the lives of a town-dwelling marriage of well-off professionals May and Nop. As in the opening sequence there lives are detached from each other only occasionally touching each other as if almost by chance. Nop is engulfed in his photography as a means to escape his failing marriage, whilst May finds solace in the arms of her coworker Korn. Without much enthusiasm May and Nop plan an escape into the wilderness and go camping in the forest. Even here in the midst of nature and cut off from other companionship they hardly intertwine and seem to exist separately. Until one night Nop wanders off in the forest only to disappear...Extremely consistent in eeriness it captivates the senses. Much thanks to the camera-work, which is terrific and beautiful stuff, albeit most of it is made with a hand-held camera making it almost reminiscent of "Blair Witch Project" (albeit with way better results). Given that this movie almost watches like a horror film it must be noted, that it is much more than just a typical genre movie. It remains creepy throughout shying away however from actually being a shock thriller or Asian horror.The ending leaves much unexplained and it would probably help a lot to be better acquainted with local mythology. Without it you can assume various plot points, but are ultimately left with many questions unanswered that seem solely cultural. Additionally the version I saw seemed to be missing a significant portion of the last 30 or so minutes and various situations seemed to have not been filmed or cut out. That said the version I watched lasted 93 minutes, while IMDb gives the Cannes copy a 109 minute runtime.All in all I found movie captivating and inspiring, although somewhat slow and drags on unnecessarily at times. The ending is not entirely satisfactory and slightly bland, but I admittedly preferred that it left so much to self-interpretation. Made a significant enough impression on me to search out other Pen-Ek Ratanaruang movies and note him down as an auteur filmmaker.

SPOILER WARNING!It is somewhat trendy these days to be 'sustainable' and 'emission free'. Ratanaruang caught this topic very well and expressed in 'Nang Mai' impersonalizing nature into a pretty young lady (the super-hot Thai actress Porntip Papanai) who suffers from the evil humans. The impersonalization is a little vague and incomplete yet the message is clear: do not hurt the nature or it will come back to you. Those who remember Pen-ek's movie 6sixtynin9 probably remember the moment where the girl gets attacked in her apartment by the gangsters and the TV is swhiched on showing some fellow talking about how important it is to "stop cutting down trees...". I believe the topic is not accidental and Mr. Ratanaruang must be a strong supporter of environmentalists which he wanted to express in his movie. My respect for that. We must protect our nature and understand the broader impact of that. I feel sorry for those who didn't quite get it and thought this was an 'ordinary' horror movie. It's not a horror movie and it's not intended to be so.

I spent a lot of my childhood poring over classical mythology, to a nerdish extent. So nymphs of all sorts are very interesting to me, one of my favourite paintings is John William Waterhouse's Hylas and The Nymphs, I find myself thinking of it when I'm in the dentist's chair, a happy place to go to! I've also become acquainted with the darker side of the tradition as an adult, for example Ezra Pound's poem April.Simply put, this film should have been right up my street. The opening scene of the film indeed was very interesting, something I enjoyed a lot. There's a scene in Philippe Garrel's experimental movie Le révélateur where the characters are fleeing across a landscape and the camera separates and meets back up with them later on in the scene. It reminds me of ice dancing, where the couple who are skating split and rejoin. That's how the first scene of Nymph works in cinematographic terms, where here the eerie Thai forest is the landscape. So that's a success.From there on the movie unfortunately went downhill. The couple in this film, Nop and May are completely flat-lining in terms of interest, they flop through the movie as if they've just awoken from a coma. We don't get any sort of sense of why they are attracted to each other, the acting is not expressive at all, the film unfortunately becomes boring.I'm worried about the level of control Ratanaruang had on this movie, because it seems to fall into fairly boring and generic horror movie tropes, and I find it hard to believe that he's done that on purpose. I felt almost like I'd watched Ring 3 by the end of it such were the boredom levels with such a tired and clichéd movie.The secrecy and furtiveness with which the nymph was filmed were (a flash in the corner of the eye now and then at the start), in my opinion, totally unnecessary, worn out stuff that you could see in Blair Witch Project, or really any generic horror movie.I felt that there was enough good material here to edit into a highly successful short. But no way was there enough for a feature film. The ending, painfully, was really rather silly.

Alright. So I saw this movie with my husband and a friend while we were in Thailand with English subtitles. I wish I had a camera to record and show you the abuses they were mouthing after seeing this movie. They thought it was going to be a horror. Although the movie was confusing and slow and "arty" (but not really in a good way) I will try to give you a fair review below:It starts out in a unique way, with a long, one cut camera shot in the jungle, about 4 or 5 minutes. There is little to no sound, just the occasional breathing and the rape scene in the distance (you never really know why that was in the movie in the first place, it never ties in and the rapists end up mysteriously dead and that's where the scene cuts, no sign of the girl that was being raped).As the movie progresses you meet the characters one by one. There is little to no talking in the movie. The few lines that there are in the beginning give away what is to be the theme of the movie...I think. They talk about evil spirits and not in much detail. About 1/4 of the movie is gone by the time some action happens in the movie. Until now, it had just been silence in establishing the affairs between the characters and the job of the husband, Nop. From here on out it is just confusing. There are lots of suspenseful scenes, as a lot of it is shot as a lone girl going through the jungle at night following scary sounds, but ultimately it is not a horror movie and no ghosts jump out at you. Oh and nothing happens. Ever. Much ado about nothing. There is a ghost in the story (maybe, you never really get to know for sure), the ghost of Nop, which appears as a normal person who drinks a lot of water (implying that somehow he has turned into a tree). Again, just kind of weird. The end is resolved by the affair ending for good as requested by the ghost/alive Nop (can't be sure). Summary: Not a horror, but has suspenseful scenes; confusing as hell; not much dialogue and what little dialogue there is does not add to the understanding of the movie; not much background music which means most of the movie is in a semi-silence.I rated it a 3 because I have to give credit to the fact that this movie actually was conceived, directed, and some how ended up in theaters, despite the fact that is the weirdest thing ever. Most movies leave you feeling someway or another, this one just left you with a ?.Comment from my husband: Don't pay lots (or any amount) of money to see this movie. Unless you really have nothing better to do and need to kill time, but be sure though because this "time" you will never get back in your entire lifetime and the movie will leave you wondering, what the f*##???? I mean for crying out loud they're screwing personified trees in the movie. Enough said.