With her assured second feature film, By the Time It Gets Dark (Dao khanong), Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong (b. 1976) has confirmed her place on the urgent front line of contemporary world cinema. Forming a diptych with her acclaimed Mundane History (Jao nok krajok), a meditation on patriarchy and artistic expression, Suwichakornpong’s new film partially focuses on a young woman struggling to make a film about political activism despite the opposition of the repressive Thai military regime, long at war with progressive and engaged cinema. A dream logic joins the two films, which share nonlinear structures and bewitching symmetries–characters at times seem to reappear in different form, and abrupt flash forwards are revealed as uncanny echoes of the past. As in the films of her compatriot Apichatpong Weerasethakul, phantom and supernatural beings drift across Suwichakornpong’s films, at times evoking Thai Buddhist ideas of the commutation of souls and rebirth while suggesting a cyclical and cosmological vision of history. The rich poetic ambiguity and suggestive power of Suwichakornpong’s films is embodied in their dual English and Thai titles that each carry different meanings, pointing to the open multiplicity of perspective and reading at the heart of her artistically and politically courageous cinema. – Haden Guest