White Building Review: A Humanistic, Slow-Burn Depiction of Uprooted Lives

Cambodian director Kavich Neang opens his elliptical fiction feature debut, White Building, with a gliding bird’s-eye shot of the titular building’s trash-ridden roof. The structure is in such a state of disrepair that it resembles ancient ruins more than a densely populated Phnom Penh apartment building that’s still brimming with life.

Given its exposed wires, leaky pipes, and water-stained ceilings, it’s no surprise that the building is being slated for demolition. For the residents, this means seemingly endless debate over the price that they’re willing to accept for their apartments from city developers—and, sadly, some are willing to settle for the most meager choices out of fear of ending up with nothing. Regardless, they all come to realize that whatever payoff they get, they will likely be forced to move outside of the city that they’ve long called home.

Anxieties about displacement hang over White Building like a dark cloud. But in the first of the film’s three segments, “Blessings,” these concerns are pushed to the background—slyly reflecting the main characters’ various forms of denial that surface throughout—as Neang follows the exploits of one of the building’s residents, Nang (Piseth Chhun).

The determined 20-year-old spends his days practicing dance routines with his two friends, Tol (Sovann Tho) and Ah Kha (Chinnaro Soem), and his nights moving ebulliently through Phnom Penh’s neon-drench streets on his beaten-down scooter, hitting on girls, and dancing to earn some cash. He desperately wants to make something of himself, and has visions of his dance troupe achieving stardom, but like the disintegrating abode that he lives in, these dreams are, unbeknownst to him, quickly approaching their expiration date.

This is easily the liveliest and most hopeful stretch of the otherwise somber White Building. The depiction of the friends’ humorous and tender relationship establishes the film’s emotional pulse, offering insight into the mindsets of some of the titular building’s younger residents. And it’s Nang’s bright-eyed optimism that makes the seemingly inevitable misfortunes that strike his family, and many others like them, sting that much more.

After Ah Kha suddenly moves to France with his family, White Building jumps several months into the future into its second and longest segment, “Spirit House,” which finds Nang struggling to find any direction for his life. Where the first part took us all around Phnom Penh, with only brief stops in Nang’s apartment, the film now stays almost exclusively within the confines of the building. The restrictiveness borders on claustrophobic, and as the pace slows to a crawl, Neang conjures a palpable aura of entrapment and helplessness.

With Nang’s family stuck in a perpetual holding pattern, and his father (Hout Sithorn) in denial about the diabetes that’s eating away at one of his toes, their dwindling faith in the future causes them to slide, ever so slowly, into an emotional and existential stasis. And it’s during this stretch that White Building gives itself too freely to the bluntly symbolic, with Nang’s father’s black, gangrene-infected toe neatly mirroring the slow dissolution of family ties and Nang’s hope for a future that’s brighter than the one he sees on the horizon.

But the film’s tightly controlled pacing and somnambulant mood, which observes rays of sunlight landing in empty rooms with an uncanny relish, reflect a respect for and familiarity with a specific environment and the people being affected by its demise. That Neang actually grew up in this building, and includes footage of its actual demolition in 2017, brings an even deeper level of emotional resonance to his depiction of the sort of urban transformation that so often devastatingly impacts the lives of the most vulnerable among us.