At its core, Samsara is a meditative voyage brought to life on celluloid. This unconventional work from Spanish director Lois Patiño ushers viewers along the karmic passage of a soul through death and rebirth. We begin in a quiet Buddhist community in Laos, where routines revolve around a nearby temple. When elderly villager Mon passes away, a local boy guides her into the bardo – a transitional plane between realms of existence.
Then Patiño pulls off some cinematic magic. Mid-film, he halts the narrative and invites the audience into darkness. For fifteen transportive minutes, we close our eyes while colors dance across the backs of our eyelids, accompanied by a hypnotic soundscape. It’s an oneiric freefall meant to emulate Mon’s disembodied trip before landing her soul in a new mortal vessel.
We then reopen our eyes to find she’s been reborn as a goat on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar. Spellbinding in scope, Samsara employs exotic locales as waystations in a larger exploration of the ceaseless cycle that links all living beings across boundaries of form and time. More than a movie, it’s a temporary passport to another plane – one well worth visiting with an open heart and mind.
A Soul’s Journey Across Bodies and Borders
Samsara eases us into Laos’ unhurried pace, steeping in the rituals of a local Buddhist temple. Young novice monks in vivid tangerine robes go about their days in meditation and study. We meet smiley teen Toumor, who befriends Amid, a village boy undertaking a spiritual errand. Amid visits bedridden elder Mon each day to read from the ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead. As Mon’s time grows short, his soothing recitation prepares her soul for the transition ahead by describing the bardo – a liminal afterlife realm where spirits wander before rebirth.
Mon shares that she hopes to return as an animal, believing human cruelty leaves beasts better off. Soon enough, her mortal frame passes. Per Buddhist tenets, Mon’s soul then navigates spectacular metaphysical landscapes, with kaleidoscopic colors and eerie echoes. Just as we begin adjusting to these disorienting planes, the film foregrounds another humble community, this time on Tanzania’s Zanzibar isle. Here we meet young student Juwairiya, whose family looks after a newborn goat kid. Glimpses of the frisky creature reveal a familiar soul peering out, giving credence to Mon’s dream of interspecies reincarnation.
By tracing one spirit through death and back to four-legged life, Samsara suggests our shared cyclical essence across physical vessels – an elevating takeaway from this thought-provoking cross-continental spiritual sojourn.
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A Feast for the Senses
Samsara seduces eyes and ears alike with dazzling aesthetics from its opening frames. Cinematographers Mauro Herce and Jessica Sarah Rinland captured the film on richly-toned 16mm film, lending scenes of tranquil temple life an organic texture and intimacy. Their camera eye glides over saffron robes and tropical greenery, sunlight dancing over tree-shaded rivers. When novice monks close their eyes in meditation, we drift into their visions. The visual textures morph into pools of crimson and ochre, suggesting a porous boundary between inner and outer worlds.
Sound designer Xabier Erkizia also conjures transportive sonic layers. Temple bells mix with cicada song, chanting voices, and gossiping village women. The ambient instrumentation takes on a spiritual air, as though the sounds themselves are divine missives. This sensory spell grows most potent during the midpoint “bardo interlude.” Inviting us to close our eyes alongside the film’s drifting soul, Erkizia floods the ears with thunderclaps, animal cries, ringing gongs. The noises swell from all directions, suggesting a synesthetic glimpse into the great beyond.
By playing with documentary realism and oneiric abstraction – in both sight and sound – Samsara expands the boundaries of cinematic language. The film seems to rearrange our neural pathways in the process, attuning our senses to mystical planes hidden within reality’s fabric. We emerge from the darkness transformed.
An Auteur’s Soulful Quest
Behind Samsara’s lens stands Spanish director Lois Patiño, an emerging visionary favoring the fringes of mainstream filmmaking. His previous shorts and features display a penchant for innovation in visual storytelling. Samsara represents Patiño’s most accessible and profoundly affecting work yet. Though still experimental in structure, the film explores timeless themes of spirituality and interconnectedness.
Patiño is especially intent on subverting expectations of cinematic engagement. He wants to activate all our senses, forcing audiences out of passive viewing habits. The film’s disruptive midpoint meditation represents the apex of this mission. By depriving sight temporarily, Patiño invites a deeper soul-based surrender to Samsara’s emotional and metaphysical undercurrents. We surface changed, with fresh eyes to recognize unseen currents toggling beneath reality’s surface.
Through lush imagery, transportive audio, and clever narrative rupture, Patiño seeks communion with energies linking this life to the next. Reincarnation becomes more than religious rhetoric. For the daring viewer, Samsara offers nothing short of temporary discorporation – a chance to hover freely with the soul before returning transformed.
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Contemplating the Cycle Of Existence
Samsara brings Buddhist tenets of rebirth to vivid life, charting one soul’s poetic passage through realms of being. But the film also touches on several resonant themes giving the journey an intellectual edge.
The most central motif is humanity’s cyclical nature across embodiments – the continual recycling of souls after death into new earthly vessels. By literally depicting an elder Laotian villager resurrected as a Tanzanian farm animal, Samsara visualize this karmic chain in blunt terms. It prompts us to consider deeper connective tissue binding all life on a spiritual level.
Relatedly, the film explores nuances in beliefs around animals’ inferior status. When the ailing Mon wishes for rebirth in a non-human form, it’s not presented as demotion but as a potential haven from mankind’s callousness. Later in Zanzibar, the influence of tourism and industry pose newer threats to traditional ways of island life. Here the film highlights deeper roots of suffering, suggesting that cyclic existence means all creatures remain vulnerable.
Yet the resplendence surrounding Mon’s passage also awakens a sense of the sublime. By intercutting the bardo’s magnificence with earthly rituals like meditation, Samsara traces a fine line between metaphysical mystery and spiritual peace always available in the present moment.
An Emotionally-Awakening Odyssey
More soul-stirring art installation than conventional biopic, Samsara employs exotic locales as mere launchpads to inward journeys of the heart and mind’s eye. Past narrative confines, the film flows dreamily yet always maintains an emotional anchor. For sensitive viewers willing to savor unpredictable filmic rhythms, transcendent rewards await.
Much hinges on a capacity for meditative surrender, never more than midway through the bardo interlude. Without foresight into what’s asked, preconceptions can taint the experience. But resting in patient trust of Patiño’s vision here pays exponential dividends. Certain moments sear into memory’s core – who knew closed eyes could occasion such visions?
Some may crave firmer plot, but Samsara spins its web delicately, at the intersection of poetic ambiguity and human recognition. The young monks, village women, even frolicking goats all emit familiar essence behind culture’s veil. Finding strands of ourselves reflected back builds the universality in this bespoke spiritual tour from Southeast Asia to coastal Africa.
If Samsara leaves any lasting impression, perhaps it is of film’s singular capacity to jolt the everyday into startling new relief. By turns emotionally expansive and intravenously intimate, these restless images implant fresh neural pathways recallable long after the projector stops. Our eyes reopen with renewed childlike wonder at the living, breathing soul we each house in bodies always shifting, yet somehow eternal.
The Review
Samsara
A cinematic mantra manifesting life’s ephemeral beauty, Samsara reaches for the senses in ways impossibly rare. Its patchwork meditation glimmers warmly when received with openness. Amid existential meanderings lie awakenings personal to every viewer.
PROS
- Visually breathtaking cinematography
- Transportive, layered sound design
- Poetic exploration of spiritual themes
- Unique bardo sequence - immersive and experimental
- Strong performances by non-professional cast
- Captures beauty of different cultures
CONS
- Unconventional narrative can challenge viewers
- Middle sequence requires surrender to the experience
- Underdeveloped characters and plot
- Slow pace may test some viewers' patience
