Samsara review – a quiet, radical masterwork

For years a fixture in the film-festival circuit’s more rarefied corners thanks to visually striking, entrancingly enigmatic shorts such as 2012’s Mountain in Shadow and 2022’s The Sower of Stars, 40-year-old Lois Patiño breaks out to significantly wider renown with his third feature-length picture Samsara – the first to obtain UK release.

A tripartite docufictional reverie that begins in Laos and ends in Zanzibar, the film’s USP is a 15-minute bridging mid-section whose nature will not be divulged in this review as its effectiveness depends heavily on the element of surprise. Suffice to say that, A) it feels like new cinematic ground is being broken before our eyes, and B) the impact is exponentially increased if experienced with people in the dark of the cinema. Bottom line: even if you must travel a long way to catch Samsara, all effort and expense will be rewarded and then some.

Like many of his fellow filmmakers hailing from Spain’s north-western province of Galicia, his approach has in the past profitably straddled the worlds of cinema and gallery/installation. And while distinctive and intermittently magisterial, his previous feature-length outings Coast of Death, from 2013, and Red Moon Tide, from 2020, together suggested he was ideally suited to smaller canvases. Not so, as it happily turns out.

The film’s ambling early stretches will come as a surprise to those familiar with Patiño’s innovative, sometimes esoteric and austere oeuvre. Samsara (the Sanskrit word refers to cycles of rebirth) initially seems to operate among the languid, torpid Southeast Asian zones of Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul. In well-worn slow-cinema style, with non-professionals playing versions of themselves, we observe the hushed quotidiana in and around a riverside Buddhist monastery.

The youthful, bald-shaved, saffron-robed trainee monks include Be Ann (Toumor Xiong); his non-monk pal Amid (Amid Keomany) pays daily visits to the elderly, ailing Mon (Simone Milavanh) and reads aloud to her ‘Bardo Thodol’, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This service is a crucial element in easing (or even enabling) Mon’s imminent transition from one plane of existence to the next.

Nothing prepares us, however, for what ensues when Mon expires. Patiño belatedly and deftly reveals his true experimental colours via a genuine coup de cinema of delightful audacity, executed with simple but overwhelming bravura. A magical quarter-hour later, the ruminative, observational “action” has elegantly segued to a Tanzanian island where a newborn female goat becomes the bleatingly wayward pet of Muslim schoolgirl Juwairiya (Juwairiya Idrisa Uwesu).

This is a seductively balanced world — in welcome contrast to the horrors with we’re currently being bombarded via all media, these are bygone ways of life apparently without conflict or strife, buoyed and propelled by harmony, simple goodness, and faith. In Samsara, the sensual and the spiritual flow together to intoxicating and invigorating effect – as the credits roll, it feels like our souls have been collectively cleansed.

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