Nymph (2009)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Good movie but grossly overrated

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The wrong film at the wrong time. So my expectations are slightly to blame, having read it was a drama/fantasy, I thought it would be a nice film for a Sunday morning. How wrong I was! The fantasy is very light, and could just be described as weird. It all starts fantastically enough with an amazing shot. The camera pans through a woodland as though itis searching for a story to tell. It soon comes across two men chasing a woman. We then hear breathing and realise this shot is the perspective of someone/something. It seems to ignore the events and soon rises higher and higher, making it obvious this is no human. As it looks down we see the two men, dead, in a river. This one shot contains more excitement, thought, and technical brilliance than the remainder of the running time. Nymph forces you to suffer through endless glaring at trees and shots of people with flashlights gradually turning around. It's a painfully tame and tedious film.

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.

Nang Mai (or Nymph) wasted 2 hours of my life. The movie starts out with what feels like a 10 minute clip of some guy walking through a forest with a camera – okay I do admit I do feel the director putting a lot of effort into the scene, shooting the entire thing in one take… but obviously he's not going to repeat this first-person biology-watching nature trip again and again right? Turns out I was wrong. The entire movie more or less consists of a long and tedious trip through Thailand's wonderful forests! It looks and feels as though as Pen-Ek Ratanaruang has a man-crush on Stanley Kubrick and wants to come up with his own Thai version of the 2001 Space Odyssey, except with this one he'll shoot 80% of the movie in one day, having actors mindlessly walk around in circles in a forest then sticking bits in to create a ridiculous excuse of a plot! His forest scenes contained absolutely NO development and puts Andy Warhol's "Sleep" to shame -- the director is too busy striving to make a strange and unusual movie in hope of creating something "unique", that he forgot to make it actually watchable. The only enjoyment I got from this movie was the seemingly random sexual bits, and Cherry Berry.I felt cheated after walking out of the cinema and want my 150 baht and my 2 hours back… not mentioning how disturbingly misleading the preview was. If you felt cheated after watching this excuse of a movie like I did, you have my sympathies… if you have not seen this movie yet, then for the love of Pete don't make the same mistake that I did!

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.