‘9 Temples to Heaven’ Cannes Review: Cinema Finds the Sacred in the Everyday
In this Thai dramedy, a man takes his ailing mother and nine relatives on a one-day pilgrimage to nine temples across Bangkok after his boss predicts she may soon die.
The impending death of a family matriarch brings her children and grandchildren together in 9 Temples to Heaven, the fiction debut of Sompot Chidgasornpongse, a frequent collaborator of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who also produces the film. The elderly woman has not yet passed, but her death has been foretold by someone Sakol—her eldest son—trusts. Convinced by this prediction, he sets out to do everything possible to prevent it, or at least delay it as long as he can.
In this unusual blend of family comedy and spiritual drama, Sakol’s proposed “solution” sounds convoluted, but it follows a certain cultural logic. His boss—who, he claims, is rarely wrong about these things—has told him that he must take nine members of his family to visit nine temples in a single day, bringing the elderly woman along to each one. According to Buddhist belief, that effort will generate the necessary “merit” to postpone her death. And so 9 Temples to Heaven unfolds as a kind of road movie: the grandmother, Sakol, spouses, siblings, children, grandchildren, and even their partners pile into two cars and set out across Bangkok, dragging along a woman who would much rather stay home, rest, and be left in peace.
The structure remains fairly consistent across the first few temples, and the director organizes the film accordingly. The cars arrive at one of the city’s striking temples, the family meets the resident monk, presents their offerings—large plastic containers filled with food and various goods—asks questions, prays, and then moves on to the next stop. Gradually, however, tensions begin to surface. Not everyone is convinced by the plan—especially the younger members—and one openly rejects religion altogether, insisting it makes no sense. Meanwhile, the grandmother, exhausted and medicated, keeps asking to return home. But Sakol is adamant: if she doesn’t visit every temple, the merit won’t be granted and the plan will fail. So what is to be done?
Chidgasornpongse approaches the journey in a way that recalls Familia rodante by Pablo Trapero—another film built around a large, mobile family with a grandmother at its center. The Thai film, however, gradually introduces a spiritual dimension. Not in overtly mystical ways, but in that distinctly Thai manner of slipping quietly into the everyday. For a good stretch, the family’s problems remain conventional and often quite funny: the logistics of moving the grandmother from place to place, listening to monks who sometimes seem more interested in the offerings than in spiritual guidance, and the familiar arguments and frictions of an extended family.
At a certain point, the grandmother appears to reach her limit, and the family fracture deepens: would taking her home undo everything they’ve done, or does the effort still count? From there, both the journey and the film itself begin to split. Around the midpoint, a striking scene—resembling an eclipse—plunges the screen into near-total darkness for almost ten minutes. From that moment on, 9 Temples to Heaven breaks apart narratively, moving into a more mysterious and mystical territory, even as the director occasionally returns to the family’s conversations and tensions.
As Chidgasornpongse has explained—drawing from similar journeys taken by his own family—the number nine is considered “magical” in Thai culture, making it essential to preserve its presence throughout. Sakol becomes obsessed with offering 9,999 baht instead of 10,000, constantly trying to maintain that number in every situation. And when that structure begins to collapse, so too does the family’s internal logic. For Sakol, every ritual must be carried out perfectly, just as his boss prescribed. For the younger generation, however, the journey itself—the effort of crossing the city while caring for their grandmother—constitutes merit in its own right, regardless of numbers or ritual precision.
At least in its first half, the film is surprisingly funny, from the family quarrels to the monks’ responses to questions about the afterlife, to the debates over offerings and the occasional detours into local sightseeing. Chidgasornpongse also captures environments where imposing Buddha sculptures coexist with the rhythms of everyday life: the heat, the rows of fans surrounding temple spaces, even the frustrations of navigating the city via GPS. Within all of this, what gradually emerges is a story about connection and disconnection—a family trying, despite everything, to overcome its differences in pursuit of a shared goal.
Films by Apichatpong, such as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, place the mystical—often ghostly—on equal footing with the everyday, as is common in Thai culture. Chidgasornpongse doesn’t go quite that far, but in the film’s final stretch he quite literally darkens the narrative, opening the door to the possible emergence of something beyond the visible world. And in the way he does so, one is left with the impression that the “religion” capable of making such mysteries believable might well be cinema itself. With a generous offering—and in the hands of a gifted filmmaker and a great cinematographer—cinema can perform more miracles than most religions.
