Nine Temples, One Day, and a Funeral Waiting at the End

Sompot Chidgasornpongse's 9 Temples to Heaven (2026) screened recently at the New York Film Festival, and it opens on a funeral. A small golden altar glows by candlelight in a dark room. More lights flicker on. The altar belongs to a larger golden structure, statues gleaming inside a temple. Outside, workers arrange chairs while a speaker rehearses the pronunciation of a name: Sakuay's. The audience learns the ending before the journey begins.

That's the film's method. Chidgasornpongse gives away the destination, then watches a family walk toward it anyway.

What is the family actually doing?

The plot is simple and strange. A middle-aged Bangkok man, Sakol (Surachai Ningsanond), must visit nine Buddhist temples in a single day with his family. They make material offerings and prayers to build "merit" (a Buddhist concept of spiritual credit earned through good deeds). The goal: extend the life of his elderly mother, Sakuay, called "Grandma" (Amara Ramnarong).

The urgency comes from Sakol's employer, who has a documented history of prescient visions. One such premonition set the deadline. Nine temples, one day. The arithmetic of salvation, apparently, allows no overtime.

Who is the filmmaker behind it?

9 Temples to Heaven is Chidgasornpongse's debut narrative feature, and his background shows. He previously directed the documentary Railway Sleepers and worked as assistant director with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand's most internationally celebrated contemporary filmmaker.

The lineage is visible. The film relies on long takes and wide angles that linger on Bangkok's contradictory architecture, cataloging, matter-of-factly, how Buddhism operates in Thailand amid capitalism and patriarchy. A mosque inside a shopping mall and AI-generated images of Trump as Jesus set the wider cultural stage; the film's observations fit comfortably within it.

Stillness, the film suggests, is not the same as neutrality. The camera's patience functions as its own quiet argument.

Why the ending-first structure matters?

Opening with funeral preparations inverts the usual suspense machine. We know Grandma's fate. The question shifts from whether the ritual works to what the family's effort means, performed at speed, under pressure, inside a country where the sacred and the commercial share real estate.

Chidgasornpongse doesn't mock the believers. He doesn't endorse the mechanics either. The film treats merit-making the way an anthropologist treats a market: record the transactions, note the architecture, withhold the verdict.

The film's timing helps. Decoding the meaning of our lives, as one assessment of the current moment puts it, remains as alluring and difficult as it ever was. 9 Temples to Heaven offers no answers, but it makes the contradictions legible, patiently and in wide angle.

Following its New York Film Festival screening, the film positions Chidgasornpongse as a documentary eye making a confident turn toward fiction, one long take at a time.