Often times I have nearly died, typically from surges of hubris overcoming me -like when I tried paleo and God promptly smacked me in the back of the head, having me in a barely functioning haze for a few days.

It is during times likes these that I tweet the best; my brain forges complete lies to make sense of when I forget what happened for a few benign hours. Now if you’d like a small taste of how confusing something like that is, watch The Blue Hour.

In this particular instance, I had nearly snapped my neck at the beach the first day I arrived then spent the next a few days trying to get ahold of one an admissions staff, and, so it goes without saying the confusion-haze was very much a thing.

So, it’s about 4 in the morning and I had just gotten done watching 2 or 3 other Netflix films that were in the Gay and Lesbian section, as dudes kissing is kind of my jam, and I stumbled on something called The Blue Hour.

The immediate allure to this was the mention of a haunted swimming pool. So I popped it on and sat through a few minutes of exposition pertaining to our protagonist’s daily life, some fairly quick payoff, confrontation, and then a good chunk of mushy, ‘coming-of-age’ filler; I thought to myself “Oh, I’ve seen this all before” but that’s the hook, y’see.

It’s that you assume the movie will just be another indie film whose premise centers around puppy love, the archaic circa-2002 plot device of homosexuality considered something devious and forbidden, and the follies of youth – but it’s much more than that.

A good hour into the movie your sense of security and presumptions start to sink into themselves like a poorly made parfait as feelings of uncertainty and dread are drip fed into your think-sponge by little peculiarities sprinkled into the otherwise tepid life of the protagonist, made doubly distressing due to his apparent ignorance to the oddities unfolding around him.

It’s a sumptuous combination of some of Lynch’s best tropes and Early-Lovecraftian elements interwoven together so flawlessly, you’d be hard pressed not to assume that this is simply an entirely new sub-genre of media, though Boonyawatanaian just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

The incorporation of Thai superstition and general brain-clownery

injected into the the film as it goes on leaves the viewer with a new type of appreciation by the end, wondering if there are more movies like this out in the world.

Much like Yung Lean or cilantro, this film is incredibly polarizing. After my obligatory shrieking about this over Skype with a few of my friends, they too watched it and the consensus was mixed, but strong on both sides.

You’ll either love this movie, or you’ll hate it, it’s got that kind of Shutter Island effect, in that you’ll probably never meet anyone who only kinda likes it. It’s pretty obvious what my opinion on this film is: you don’t have to read through the lines so much as just read, and that’s fine. It’s impossible to be opinionless on most, if not all things, so I see no reason to hide it. You might hate it, who knows? But there’s really only one way to find out, huh?