With three beguiling solo features under his belt, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has established himself as the master of the slow reveal. Tropical Malady opens with a group of soldiers in the clearing of a forest, happily posing for photos with what is eventually revealed to be a human corpse they've found. While the delightfully oblique Blissfully Yours eventually revealed the motivations behind its characters' odd behavior, it's symptomatic of Tropical Malady's impenetrability that the corpse is never directly referred to again after that opening. The first half of the film involves a flirtatious relationship between Keng (Banglop Lomnoi), a soldier, and Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), and it has some of the same free-ranging offbeat erotic charm as Blissfully Yours (the groping scene in the movie theater in particular). Weerasethakul continues to use music inventively and fill the screen with gorgeous images. The second half of the film, dealing with (in a very literal way) the Thai myth of a soldier (Lomnoi) hunting a tiger's spirit that takes the form of a naked man (Kaewbuadee), abandons the earlier narrative on all but a symbolic level. Unlike Blissfully Yours, which gradually builds to a startling emotional impact, Tropical Malady goes off the deep end into visually rich but slow-moving fantasy and never really recovers.