The Long Walk (Bor Mi Vanh Chark)

 The Laos countryside fifty years in the future looks very much like the Laos countryside a hundred years in the past. A little future-tech intrudes into this impoverished pastoral every now and then - people have displays running on their arms, or pay for stuff by holding their wrists up to scanners - but other than that their houses are still rickety wood and wicker structures that might as well have been the same three (or thirteen) centuries earlier. They still struggle to eke out a living from subsistence farming, and sell their produce on a wooden stand on the roadside in the same way their ancestors have going many generations back.

 It's a shrewd, very real point in a movie full of very shrewd, very well observed moments.

 The Long Walk does have some science fiction elements, but they're used as a backdrop to a puzzle of a story that straddles the line between drama and horror (leaning heavily towards the drama side of things.)

 It's a quiet, smart movie that lets you figure out what's going on in your own time.

 An old man (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy) lives on a small house on the outskirts of a village, making a meager living of selling bits and pieces he scavenges on the countryside. He's also able to see ghosts, one of which (Noutnapha Soydara) has accompanied him on the walk between his house to the village since he was a little kid.

 Saying more would edge into spoiler territory, as much of the joy in this film comes from putting all the pieces of the puzzle together yourself. Answers come slowly - ghosts don't talk, and the old man is pretty laconic - but they do come, and once assembled they resolve into an intricate, affecting character study that's spliced with a neat, thematically appropriate time travel story.

 Besides the ghosts you get a lot more blood than you'd expect, but as a horror movie it doesn't really go for scares. It's gorgeously shot with a lot of sun-drenched, verdant scenery, but when it goes dark it can be very effectively creepy. It's really hard to make a compelling film out of a script that holds back so much information for so long, so major props both to scriptwriter Christopher Larsen and director Mattie Do for pulling it off so beautifully.

 The acting is great. The Old Man oozes grief and resentment, making all the horrible decisions he makes a little more poignant and understandable, Ghost Girl does so much just with her eyes, and little kid is heartbreaking at points. (none of the characters are ever named.)

 I do have one problem with one of the plot developments, but guess it wouldn't be a proper time travel movie if it made sense.

 Saying that this is the best Laotian movie I've ever seen is not high praise, since I think it might be the only Laotian movie I've seen, but it's definitely one of the best movies I've seen this year. Absolutely recommended.