Promised Spaces (2026) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for apocalyptic vistas
Take a Drink: whenever it rains
Take a Drink: for talk or use of swimming pools
Take a Drink: for complaints or nitpicks
Do a Shot: for stymied resolution for those complaints or nitpicks
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
I can’t say I’ve seen many films set in Cambodia, and certainly few indeed not focused on its darkest days- White Building is all that springs to mind, a film that just so happens to parallel (maybe even precede?) this film a bit.
Promised Spaces observes the few people that populate an apartment developing rising out of Cambodia’s jungle, from the workers building it to its first solitary paying resident.
A Toast
Director Ivan Marković, a cinematographer by trade (this is his feature-length directorial debut) drops us en media res sometime late in the night or early in the morning among the crickets and the concrete skeletons of high rises to come. Sleepless construction workers find some respite together, escaping the sweltering heat of their dormitories into the almost palpably cool(er) night air.
Marković and his team deploy very tactile lensing to immerse you in this strange environment. He’s picked a good setting – there’s not much more uncanny than a nigh-deserted, essentially brand new living space meant for thousands. Perhaps it’s the heat, or perhaps it’s the general aura of the place, but most folks are in a torpor. Waiting is the default.
As the story shifts to our first tenant for the newly completed residence, she finds herself in a kind of Purgatory- her building may be finished and furnished, but there aren’t even any restaurants close by, and she finds nothing but small issues and maddening bureaucracy resisting any effort to resolve them as she settles in.
Taken altogether, this film creates a just ever so heightened version of the ironic realities of modernization and a building boom that’s gotten ahead of its skis in Cambodia. One thinks of the Chinese cities awaiting a population boom or perhaps general economic uplift that doesn’t appear to be coming any time fast. Marković ends things poetically, with perhaps a return to nature for people, if not necessarily for this concrete-covered land (but nature has a tendency to reclaim even that, given half a chance).
Beer Two
This is a (beautifully rendered) mood piece- there’s not much of a plot to speak of, feature enough for me, but bug to others, I understand.
Verdict
Promised Spaces is a quiet and contemplative slice of life in uncanny underpopulated high rises of Cambodia’s rapidly developing cities.
