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 be from three (or thirteen) centuries earlier. They still struggle to eke out a living from subsistence farming, and they sell their produce on a wooden stand on the roadside the same way their ancestors have going many generations back. A shrewd, very real observation in a movie full of 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  ghost story that straddles the line between drama and horror; It's one of those quiet, unobtrusive 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 of technology he scavenges on the countryside. He's also able to see ghosts, one of which (Noutnapha Soydara) has accompanied him on the (long) 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), 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 bit more blood than you'd expect for a movie this quiet, but it doesn't ever really go for scares - just a pervading sense of creepiness. It's gorgeously shot with a lot of sun-drenched, verdant scenery and carefully chosen colour palettes.

 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 to married couple Christopher Larsen (script) and Mattie Do (direction) for pulling it off so beautifully.

 The acting is great, too; 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 given proper names.)

 I do have a problem with some of the film's logic, and one of the plot developments doesn't make sense, but guess it wouldn't be a proper time travel movie without at least one major plot hole.

 Saying that this is the best Laotian movie I've ever seen wouldn't mean much, since I think it might be the only Laotian movie I've ever seen, but let me put it this way: it's easily in my top ten films of the last decade.