This mesmerising second feature from Thai film-maker Anocha Suwichakornpong, writer/director of 2009’s Mundane History, is a kaleidoscopic meditation on the shifting relationship between past and present, truth and fiction, movies and memory. A self-referential treatise on the impossibility of capturing “real” life on camera, it begins with a single linear narrative that mushrooms into something altogether wider and more weird. Described by its creator as both an “ode to the memory-recording and reconstructing machine that is cinema” and “my attempt to deal with the impossibility of making a historical film in a place where there is no history”, it’s a dizzying, dazzling work – elliptically political, frequently perplexing, yet fluid enough in its possibilities to allow each viewer to divine their own meanings from its quicksilver forms.

It begins with a single linear narrative that mushroom into something altogether wider and weirder

From the outset, a series of framing devices (wooden shutters, glass windows, camera lenses) invites us the consider the theatrical artifice of everything we see. An early sequence depicting the atrocities of 6 October 1976, when state forces and rightwing paramilitaries attacked students at Thammasat University in Bangkok, is soon revealed to be a dramatisation – a performance orchestrated for the cameras. Film-maker Ann (played by Karaoke Girl director Visra Vichit-Vadakan) is working on a script for “a drama of sorts” with former student activist Taew (Rassami Paoluengtong), a survivor of the 1976 massacre who blossomed “from It-girl to protest leader” and now has “a life worth living”. Their meeting will later be reorchestrated, ambiguously, as soap-opera drama, with glamorised doppelgangers restaging their conversations For now, Nong (Atchara Suwan), a waitress in a cafe they visit, suggests pointedly that Taew should be the author of her own story, cutting to the heart of Ann’s belief that her role as director is merely to appropriate someone else’s life.

Nong resurfaces in many guises, from a cleaner in a mirrored sports club to a shaven-headed Buddhist, a symbol of multiple lives meeting in a single body. Meanwhile, Ann tastes mushrooms grown in “the traditional way”, prompting a hallucinogenic forest encounter in which past and present appear to eye each other with suspicion.

As the film fragments, we observe the wordless transformation of lush green leaves into cured brown tobacco, which is then inhaled by a truck driver who turns out to be a popular star, played by dreamboat musician/model/actor Arak Amornsupasiri. He’s reading a script for an independent movie with a “role written specifically for me… ” And so on.

The original Thai title of By the Time It Gets Dark is Dao Khanong (literally “Wild Star”), a district on the outskirts of Bangkok which Anocha Suwichakornpong describes as “not a destination”, suggesting that it’s the journey that matters. Throughout this journey, she wonders about memory in an age in which digital images have replaced the act of looking – something that provides a kind of freedom, but also an abandonment of engagement. (When her film performs its own version of the final-frame burn out from Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, instead of appearing to melt like celluloid in a projector, it’s a corrupted digital image that sputters across the screen).

She also worries about the “black hole in Thai history” that still surrounds the events of 1976 and asks whether those who do not remember this history are condemned to repeat it, as the country’s turbulent past and present are folded together.

Amid the political allusions, the intertwining of the natural and supernatural worlds recalls the work of fellow countryman Apichatpong Weerasethakul, not least during a matter-of-fact monologue about telekinetic childhood powers in which the speaker’s face seems to age as the camera’s gaze draws us close, then closer still.

Elsewhere, the spiralling collage of visual styles swings from a satirical high-gloss facsimile of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai to the low-tech video experiments of France’s Michel Gondry. En route, we glance back to the experimental cinema of Georges Méliès (an excerpt from 1902’s Le Voyage dans la Lune finds umbrella mushrooms sprouting on the moon) and forward to the bifurcated highways of David Lynch.

It’s an intoxicating cocktail, with bursts of time-travelling song breaking through the underlying thrum of insect life, leading towards a trance-dance finale that left my head spinning. I saw the movie first thing in the morning and was enraptured, baffled, alarmed and inspired. By the time it got dark, I was still trying to make sense of it all. Now it’s your turn.