A “Nymph” ventures into Un Certain Regard

For the first time in his career, young Thai filmmaker Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, selected by Directors Fortnight on two occasions, in 2002 for Monrak Transistor and in 2007 for Ploy, is presenting one of his films at Un Certain Regard. Nymph is a supernatural love story which takes us to a place in the jungle where, once upon a time, a maiden was ravished by two men. Some days later, the men’s bodies were found in the waters of a nearby river, drifting with the current, but no one ever found out what had happened to the poor young woman, or who or what might have saved her life…

“Although it is a ghost story,” Ratanaruang comments, the film can’t be categorized as a horror movie. It is simply tinged with mystery. An unusual love story, it is sort of a transposition of an Edgar Allan Poe short story to a contemporary context. Nymph tries to explore the spiritual side of human nature. In many films, phantoms are evil creatures. But I didn’t want to take that path. Here, it is the living humans who have something diabolical inside. All you have to do is think of the horrible things we are capable of doing to each other in real life. Would the ghosts do anything nearly as bad? I don’t think so.”