Dir: Sompot Chidgasornpongse | 2026 | Fantasy Drama
9 Temples to Heaven arrives at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival as one of those quietly elusive works that seem almost designed to resist easy interpretation. Directed by Sompot Chidgasornpongse and produced by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the film follows a Thai family – a man, his sick mother and relations – on a pilgrimage, but that simple premise barely captures its drifting, meditative pull.
Lulled by its langorous setting the film unfolds as a slow-burn ritual. There is no conventional narrative urgency. Instead, the film takes it time making use of long takes and stillness. The pilgrimage itself becomes less about destination and more about the quiet accumulation of gestures. Watching it, there’s a sense that the real subject is not faith or family but time—how it stretches, enriches, and occasionally dissolves.
Chidgasornpongse’s style clearly echoes the influence of Weerasethakul, but it doesn’t feel derivative so much as complementary. There’s the same sensitivity to landscape, the same porous boundary between the material and the spiritual. Yet 9 Temples to Heaven is perhaps more down to earth, less inclined toward surrealism. Its spirituality is embedded in repetition: footsteps, prayers, shared meals. These rhythms create a hypnotic atmosphere, though one that occasionally borders on inertia.
There’s a sense of being pulled into a world and a need to fully surrender to that environment in order to fully appreciate 9 Temples. That slowness will be divisive for some. The family at its remains slightly out of reach, glimpsed rather than fully understood. Whether that distance is intentional or limiting is difficult to decide.
Visually, this film is quietly stunning. The temples—each distinct, each marked by its own textures and colour, anchor the film’s episodic structure. There’s a palpable quality to the imagery: humidity in the air, the weight of fabric, the shimmer of gold against stone. These details ground the film’s more abstract ambitions, reminding you that transcendence, if it exists here, is inseparable from the physical world.
9 Temples to Heaven doesn’t have a resolution it blows out like a will of the wisp, leaving your relaxed and at peace, but not necessarily satisfied, or even moved.
In the crowded landscape of Cannes, where films often compete for attention through urgency or spectacle, this one does the opposite: it recedes in a way that is extremely oriental. For those willing to meet it on its own terms, it offers something rare—a cinematic experience that feels less like watching and more like wandering.
CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2026 | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT 2026