Wanderer in Bewitching, Fractious Land // Vimukthi Jayasundara's 'Between Two Worlds'

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

Riven with violence and haunted by the dead and the missing, “Between Two Worlds” is a hallucinatory experience. The worlds in question could be a number of things — heaven and hell, peace and war, past and present; but in a film this vivid and this oblique, the cumulative thrust of the images is what pulls us through.

Like Mr. Jayasundara’s 2005 feature, “The Forsaken Land,” “Between Two Worlds” is deeply embedded in Sri Lanka’s devastating civil war and the societal fissures that have resulted. Elements of folklore, myth and political symbolism speckle the story (in one scene a man in a Mickey Mouse mask is mercilessly beaten in the middle of a street strewn with smashed television sets), and marauding rebels prowl on the margins.

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