Ploy
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Muranów
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Film description
Wit and Dang, a married couple who have fallen into a rut, return from the United States to Bangkok after ten years to attend a relative’s funeral. Jet lag keeps them awake at the hotel, and Wit spends a sleepless night in the bar, where he meets Ploy, a young woman who could be his daughter. Dang struggles to hide her jealousy, and the tension between them mounts by the minute. Between naps, the three drift through the hotel’s labyrinth, gradually losing all sense of time and purpose. Behind the wall of their room, meanwhile, another, more intimate story is unfolding: a chambermaid is having an affair with a waiter.
Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s sensual, dreamlike film builds tension by blurring the boundary between waking and dreaming, inviting viewers to contemplate a sensory experience in which it becomes impossible to tell whether something really happened or was merely conjured by an exhausted mind. Ploy exemplifies the themes central to the Thai director’s work, exploring his favourite motif of crime and guilt, which continually elude detection amid the shifting boundaries of reality. Ratanaruang also captures the peculiar feeling of returning to one’s home country only to find that it no longer feels like home, a sensation embodied by the hotel as a non-place where the rules of everyday life are temporarily suspended.
text:
Łukasz Mańkowski
Pen-ek Ratanaruang
Born in Bangkok in 1962, studied art history at New York’s Pratt Institute from 1977 to 1985. He began his career as an illustrator and designer before joining Film Factory in Bangkok in 1993, where he met Wisit Sasanatieng. Both directors are regarded as leading figures of the Thai New Wave. At Film Factory, Pen-ek made several highly successful commercials that won numerous awards. A few years later, he made his feature film debut with Fun Bar Karaoke, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. In the 2000s, Pen-ek became involved in a series of pan-Asian productions, collaborating with filmmakers from Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong, among others. In recent years, he has divided his time between collaborative projects and his own films. A retrospective of his work was presented at the 3rd Five Flavours Asian Film Festival, which also distributed his film Samui Song. In 2026, two of his films, Ploy and Morte Cucina, were selected for the festival programme.
1997 Fun Bar Karaoke
1999 69 / Ruang Talok 69 / 6ixtynin9
2001 Monrak Transistor
2003 Ostatnie życie we wszechświecie / Ruang Rak Noi Nid Mahasan / Last Life in the Universe
2006 Niewidzialne fale / Invisible Waves
2007 Ploy
2009 Nimfa / Nang mai / Nymph
2011 Headshot: Mroczna karma / Headshot
2014 The Life of Gravity / Raeng dueng dood
2017 Samui Song
2025 Morte Cucina
