Recently I was approached by Vincent Lodder and Jonathan Kray with the question if I would be interested to watch their film Lost in Laos. Often my experience in these type of situations is that the quality of the movie is disappointing and a waste of my time. Because of that I always first watch the trailer before I decline in a friendly way to watch and review it. But the trailer which I saw for Lost in Laos made me curious. Trailers can paint a false image of the final quality of a movie, but in this case I decided to give it a chance.
Coen (Lodder) gets a worrying phone call from a clinic in Bangkok. His brother David (Kray) turns out to be ill, but Coen (who is in the Netherlands) can’t get a hold of him. Nobody seems to know where David is and Coen regularly receives video messages from his brother, which slowly start to become more strange and suddenly stop. Coen decides to travel to Asia to try to localise him and tries to get clues from the videos he received on his whereabouts.
The main roles are also played by the directors, writers and cameramen of this movie. They shot it during a five-week period in 2012 while travelling through Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. The movie feels like the diary of Coen. In a voiceover he tells what he is going through and how he feels. You see him following in the footsteps of his brother, who you regularly see in low quality videos and where he starts to look worse and worse. While David enjoyed his journey through Asia, for Coen it is a horrible experience. He can’t enjoy his surroundings and the people. The uncertainty of what happen to his brother consumes him.
It takes a bit getting used to the diary format, but it is very effective. Lodder and Kray have made good use of the limited budget they had to really pull the viewer into the story. Because of the way it is told it feels realistic, although there are a couple of moments in which his mother calls where that voice felt a bit overacted. Those moments don’t happen often though. In general Lost in Laos is an interesting film with beautiful environments and a lot of dramatic moments. If you like the trailer than you should check out the movie on Vimeo (the link can be found in the trailer).
