In a dark night in Kelantan, the northern state of Malaysia close to the border with Thailand, two elderly persons are talking on their way to the local inn. They talk about the funerary ritual they will have to perform the following day and the silly TV correspondents arrived from the city to film it. When they get to the inn, the camera gets closer to the TV broadcasting the interviews of the leading characters of the movie. The image on the TV screen becomes a clear sky above a beach where some small tableau follow one another. The two elderly persons are concentrated on their rite, the theorists check the project to develop on those beaches and a child from the village rushes to the scene of what seems to be a crime. The scene reaches its peak when the child with his blood-soaked chest leaves in a hurry: he is framed through the tear of a screen of the wayang kulit, the theatre of shadows. Cut. The dark night and the chat between the two elderly persons who talk about spirits, myths and possessions return again. The lights of two motorbikes disperse in the lamp which overhangs the ring of a kickboxing match. We are going back in time, beyond the borders, in Thailand where the Malaysian boxer Adil –known as Bunga Lalang– fights in a boxing match which is probably rigged. Thanks to a crossed cutting, the match on the boxing ring offers the most inviting rhythms of a scene set in a massage salon. After a massage performed by a blind masseur, Ilham puts himself in his place again: he is a murderer. The quiet and drowsy atmosphere of the salon is upset by a violent crime committed in the shower ... In the meantime, Adil’s match is becoming cruel and a group of his fellow countrymen suddenly pour onto the ring to drag him away from such pandemonium and rush towards the border and the native village from which he had been away for four years. In the meantime, Ilham gets a new mission: he has to return to his native village, Bunohan (lit. homicide) to bring Bunga Lalang to Thailand dead or alive, better dead than alive.
The second piece of work by Dain Said (whose first feature film, Dukun, remains one of the best kept secrets of worldwide cinema of the last years: stopped by the film studios some days before its release, this controversial horror movie became the subject of manifold speculations about the real contents and quality, but few people really watched it), Bunohan is an enchanting and fascinating movie which is on the ridge of many borders. Wavering between genre and playwright, set in a land of white sands and marshlands and mangroves infested with crocodiles (and the spirits of ancestors transformed into crocodiles or birds...), full of skies with threatening monsoon clouds, Bunohan has a background plot which seems it has stolen the rich local evocative power of a nearly disappeared cultural and performing heritage from a tragedy by Shakespeare. After all, the father of the three brothers at the centre of the drama is a master of wayang kulit (the Malaysian-Indonesian shadow theatre) who did not succeed in passing his art to next generations and his death marks inevitably the metaphoric and definitive extinction of mankind, times and places which lived and were lived in cohabitation with the mythical dimension of spirits and legends.
Dain Said’s movie recreates such time and space which remain suspended in a highly imaginative movie and complex drama which anyway offers a substantial observation on the clash between tradition and modernity, too. A conflict based on cultural identity where peoples not only run the risk of losing their land, but also their history and collective imagination. In its own small way, Bunohan claims a piece of that land which is going to be lost through a cultured and refined, but also fiery and deep-rooted cinema.