Although not an easy film to watch by any means, this Australian production (but shot in Cambodia) should be mandatory viewing for anyone in the West who thinks they have thankless jobs. This is because pretty much anyone in the First World has a brighter occupational future than Buoyancy’s young protagonist Chakra (Sharm Heng), who toils in what amounts to a lifetime of indentured servitude on his parents’ farm, lugging around impossibly heavy loads and planting and sowing rice nonstop with no prospects of earning anything other than a bed and a roof over his head.
Eventually Chakra decides that any future is brighter than life as a slave for his ruthless family, so he decides one day to drop everything and run away from home, come what may. Chakra takes off for over the Cambodian border into Thailand to search for actual paid labor. Trouble is, Chakra unfortunately finds out that things actually can get worse. He finds himself first at a hellish rural factory doing menial work, but he’s than sold off to the captain of a fishing trawler and made to work what is essentially just more slave labor, except the slave drivers he works for are even more horrible and sadistic than his parents were.
After suffering through and witnessing one atrocity after another on the fishing boat, Chakra realizes he’s got to come up with another plan of escape or eventually succumb to the tortuous treatment of his evil overseer: he has to become as hard-bitten and merciless as his captors. Buoyancy is an unrelentingly visceral film able to proffer audience-challenging violence without resorting to blatant violence porn. And the nonprofessional Heng cast as Chakra in this physically challenging role proves you don’t need a degree in drama from Julliard to give an onscreen clinic on how physiognomy alone can be used to create an unforgettable character. Recommended.