Increasingly densely layered, By the Time It Gets Dark struggles a bit to balance its extended, dramatic narrative sections with its essay-film impulses. The central historical event haunting the movie is a 1976 massacre in Thailand, in which government soldiers and paramilitary members tortured and killed student protestors at Thammasat University. Written and directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong, the movie’s most anchored section involves a young filmmaker (Visra Vichit-Vadakan) interviewing an older survivor (Rassami Paoluengtong) about her memories of the event. Showcasing a quiet command of the camera, Suwichakornpong manages some numinous moments here: a shared song between the women when the power goes out, as well as an encounter the filmmaker has in the forest with a child in a cat costume, who might be a younger version of herself. But then Suwichakornpong begins to expand her movie outwards (or perhaps inward) in increasingly self-reflexive loops, punctuated by occasional avant-garde elements (including clips from Georges Melies’ silent landmark A Trip to the Moon). More characters are also added and given ample screen time, including a popular actor (Pae Arak Amornsupasiri), suggesting that a “movie within the movie” framework has been at play all along. While always mesmerized, I admittedly got lost amidst the layers—though certainly much of that is due to my lack of context as a learning Western viewer.
(3/5/2026)
