Samsara review: A truly extraordinary film (even if it drives you mad)

Film critics are always banging on about films you really “have to see on the big screen”. The profession has, however, never before demanded such attention for a film that will be largely unviewable for a good portion of its odd middle. That’s not quite right. Obviously one can watch the abstract transition at the heart of Lois Patiño’s spiritual odyssey. Nobody will be prowling the aisles demanding you cover your face. But a message on the screen does, indeed, urge you to close your eyes until the soundtrack goes silent.

For some 20 minutes, throbs and flickers make it through as blaring drones give way to smatterings of conversations in various languages. It is unfairly facetious – but irresistible – to note that, in another era, Samsara would have played to the sweet scents of hand-rolled smokables. And nobody would have asked for their money back.

The Spanish film-maker does, however, have a more serious aim in mind. The film charts the spiritual journey of a Mon, (initially) an elderly woman in a remote quarter of Laos. Every day a young fellow visits her and reads from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. At other points he and his pal discuss mystical matters. One discerns that a tree is looking at him. “It has always been looking at you. You just didn’t notice,” the other notes. Saffron robes echo yellowy blossoms as the gorgeous cinematography stretches across the screen.

After she dies, that legend comes on screen. “Mon’s spirit is going to travel through the Bardo – the intermediate reality,” it reads. “We will go along with her. To make this trip we must close her eyes.” On the other side, Mon is, indeed, reborn as a baby goat in Zanzibar.

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That section, pitched somewhere between Au Hasard Balthazar and an Iranian family film, is utterly charming, but it is the interregnum that will earn Samsara a place in cinematic history. Those who disobey instructions and peek will see a mass of strobing blocks that, in different circumstances, could be employed by CIA torturers. Viewed through your eyelids they encourage blank meditation, chemical epiphany and, one has to assume, religious ecstasy.

Samsara would be easy to dismiss if it were not carried off with such dexterous panache. A truly extraordinary piece of work (even if it drives you mad).