Peter Bradshaw The Guardian, Friday September 21 2007 - a direct quotation;
"Profoundly mysterious, erotic, funny, gentle, playful, utterly distinctive, it is the work of the Thai director and installation-artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who now has a claim to be approaching the league of Kiarostami and Haneke, one of modern cinema's great practitioners. It's a film that requires an openness of mind and heart for its music to be heard and it will reward this commitment of attention a hundredfold. I found it a transcendentally happy experience: inducing a joyous and calm kind of euphoria. As many people as practicable should go to see it, at least partly to increase the likelihood of someone being able to explain exactly what it is all about.
What is it all about? Like Weerasethakul's previous features - Tropical Malady (2004) and Blissfully Yours (2001) - it takes as its starting point a tale of tangled human relationships, in this case the faltering love life of a demure young female doctor at a remote, upcountry Thai hospital. Then it takes off into alternative worlds, alternative realities, unrealities, surrealities. The same scenes are played again, in different settings, with different people. The Buddhist idea of reincarnation is being sported with. Or is the film simply questioning the 19th Century train-tracks of traditional narrative? Weerasethakul's camera, usually in one fixed position for a single take, will suddenly drift back or to the side while one character fixes it with a serene unreadable gaze. Having gestured at the languour of romantic fulfilment and the discomfort and pain of its opposite, baffling images and sequences will unfold with the unsettling quality of a horror film.
The action shows a young doctor interviewing new applicants; one declares his love for her. But a flashback - that most conventional of things - shows the shy young woman's burgeoning friendship for another man who appears to think of her only as a pal, although whether this causes her anguish is an enigma. A hospital dentist has an intimate friendship with his monk patient, an intimacy born of their mutual passion for music; the dentist is an amateur singer, the monk once dreamed of being a DJ. People, and things, are not what they seem. A tippling consultant drinks Scotch from a hidden bottle, and it is perhaps her boozy nightmare we are seeing as the camera cruises through a semi-real, misty hospital boiler room and lingers, disquietingly, on some sort of open pipe whose aperture is intended to resemble the solar eclipse which had formed the centrepiece of an earlier, epiphanic moment.
Startlingly, Weerasethakul will reprise scenes we had already seen, now set apparently in a modern city hospital. The manageable linear course of events is forever being bisected by unhurried exposition of related themes and images, as if Weerasethakul wishes to stop covering narrative ground in the normal way and take a conceptual soil sample. The final sequence takes place in a modern city that could be Bangkok, or perhaps it is a modern city under construction, the city of the future in which a male doctor's lover - we see their extended, passionate kiss - dreams one day of living.
"Syndromes and a Century" is a poem on screen: a film of ideas and visual tropes that upends conventional narrative expectations, not out of a simple desire to disconcert but to break through the carapace of normality, to give us the knight's-move away from reality that the Russian formalists said was the prerogative of art. It's a movie to be compared with the work of Antonioni - or Sergei Parajanov. Perhaps, with its freakiness and scariness in those hospital basement scenes, it is something that might have intrigued Kubrick. If you want a film as challenging and exhilarating as the most weird and wonderful exhibition at Tate Modern, if you are bored with all the usual boilerplate material coming out of Hollywood, or even if you're not, then this is a film for you. Try it."