Mary is Happy Mary is Happy review: as profound as it is surreal

The big concept: working from the random tweets of an anonymous teenage girl – @marylony – the daring young Thai auteur Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit has crafted his own fictionalised version of account-user Mary Malony. The nature of micro-blogging makes for random and occasionally absurd witterings: “I want a jellyfish” or “I want birthday cake even though it’s not my birthday.” But that hasn’t prevented the writer-director from creating a work that is as profound as it is surreal.

The film's Mary (the superb Patcha Poonpiriya) attends a gated school that looks like a mess of abandoned prefabs. Her straight-talking best friend Suri (Chonnikan Netjui, excellent) is hoping to attend university in Austria, but for the moment she's happy to assist Mary in assembling the yearbook, a project that somehow expands into an epic production. At a visit to a local food wagon, Mary encounters M, a boy who comes to occupy her every waking thought, although, as she notes, she never dreams about him. When things with M don't go according to plan, Mary soon gets mopey, then angsty; then she finally descends into a state that feels like a blackly comic echo of Esther Greenwood from The Bell Jar.

Typical teen dramas and observations – “Last night I dreamt I went swimming but the bikini was ugly” – are appropriately magnified or distorted. There are outbreaks of self-reflexivity. “You’ve written a standard drama,” scolds Mary’s ill-defined media teacher. “Beginning, middle, end, nothing new, everything has been done.”

Except this hasn't been done before. Never mind the novelty of being the "First Twitter Movie". Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy is a genuine original: a sort of Celine and Julie Go Tweeting. Between demented diversions into a cake shop that could work as a Daft Punk video and canned soup named for a late headmaster, we find a touching portrait of female friendship. Odd personality tics, such as Mary's lunatic insistence on shooting last-light photographs, cement the idea that we're operating in dream space. Odder subplots, notably Mary's increasing compliance around a stern teacher, serve to flag the heroine's developing maturity. For better or worse. Patcha Poonpiriya is simultaneously awkward and beautiful as the film's transfixing titular heroine.