Buddhist sci-fi mystery. Well, there’s a phrase that piques a thought bubble or two, huh? You know, I played bass for Buddhist Sci-fi Mystery in the 1990s. But that’s another story. Today, we deal with Karmalink, an ambitious bi-polar film about a Cambodian slumdog who –for reasons unknown- seems to have memories of lecturing at MIT and collecting a golden statue (and, perhaps, passing it to Indiana Jones).
Leng Heng (Leng Heng Prak – how long did it take you to come up with that character name?) is an orphan living in the discarded laundry of Phnom Penh. He starts having visions of hiding a golden Buddha statue. The weird and seemingly non-sequitur intro set in another place and time makes us believe these visions are real. But how can they be? I mean, he has visions of things he’s clearly never done in places he’s clearly never visited.
One person who believes Leng is his older, more assertive friend, Srey Leak (Srey Leak Chhith …boy, you guys spared not one iota of thought on the screenplay naming conventions, huh?), and she’s going to get to the bottom of this. It won’t be easy; this is a sci-fi crime and they have an alley-behind-the-Dollar Store budget.
I can’t possibly exaggerate the proper degree of contrasts between the worlds shown in this film – on the one hand, there are Leng and Srey in the hovels of Phnom Penh. They have to sell family keepsakes just to get a tuktuk ride across the bridge. On the other hand, there’s the world they discover where the internet can be accessed through head implants. The science is off-the-charts here and nobody who frequents would dare be caught in a tuktuk. So what’s the connection between the worlds … and where is that damn idol?
Karmalink is enjoyable if frustrating. Everyone loves a good treasure hunt, but then this scientific crap turns out to be much bigger than a silly statue, so eventually we’re going to have a showdown between worlds – and the quest will likely be irrelevant, making me wonder why the Hell we bothered getting invested with the first half of the film. I liked Karmalink, but I suspect I was supposed to like it a Matrix amount when I actually didn’t even like it a National Treasure amount. It reminded me a great deal of a better way-out-there connection film that wasn’t so bipolar in nature – I Origins. If you’ve seen neither film; I recommend the latter first.
A waif living in a Cambodian ditch
Believes he has some DNA glitch
Buddhism innate
Did he pre-incarnate?
Turns out karma can be a switch
Not Rated, 101 Minutes
Director: Jake Wachtel
Writer: Jake Wachtel, Christopher Larsen
Genre: Bipolar worlds
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People who believe in connection
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Skeptics
