Invisible Waves

This is the much-anticipated follow up collaboration between Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, expatriate Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle and Japanese star Asano Tadunobu, after 2004’s Last Life in the Universe. Like that film, it mixes the unlikely elements of film noir and minimalist reticence—perhaps film gris would be a better term. Asano works as a chef in Macao who commits the ultimate act of bad faith—sleeping with his boss’s wife and then murdering her. He makes his getaway to Thailand aboard the world’s worst cruise ship, which you start to suspect might offer some sort of symbolic passage into Hell. The humour of his misadventures is wryly observed and the ambient music which underscores the whole film levels out any dramatic peaks. This de-dramatised thriller works to foreground the sustained yet subtle visual innovation that is at the heart of the collaboration between Pen-Ek and Doyle. The innovations in framing, staging, camera placement and selective focus set up the space to convert melodrama into contemplation.

If Jacques Tati, the French comic absurdist, had ever made a gangster thriller, it probably would have looked like Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Invisible Waves.

Hollywood Reporter