I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is practically a silent film.

In fact, you could say it is more silent than the films of the silent era, for its quietness extends beyond the wordless, nameless nature of its characters, beyond the stillness of the spaces they inhabit, beyond the aloofness of the narrative style.

It is a silence that runs into disquiet, into some unfathomable depth of desire and despair. It is a silence that is — to borrow a cliché — deafening.

To enter Malaysian-born filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’s universe is to be plunged into a sort of aqueous arcanum of the human psyche — everything inchoate, surreal, and sexually charged; everything free-floating but on the verge of sinking, drifting somewhere we can’t quite guess where, like so much flotsam and jetsam of the self.

That, at least, is the experience of watching the film.

In any case, Tsai’s world is a strange and oblique one. It is bleak, frequently sordid, and quite a bit hilarious. It is also, despite its meandering pace, hypnotic and compelling.

I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is about the lives of KL’s migrant workers, in particular two men and a woman played by regular Tsai-collaborator Lee Kang-sheng (a man of indeterminate nationality and job), newcomer Norman Atun (a Bangladeshi worker), and Chen Shiang-chyi (maid, coffeeshop waitress, caregiver).

It is a story that scours the underbelly of KL, in what looks like the Pudu area, as it follows in the footsteps of the characters, through the highs and lows of their diminished lives. As it does so, the familiar is made strange and the strange is made intimate.

The KL depicted is a KL we see only in passing, with eyes wide shut, and there is a measure of “just desserts” to the fact that our immersion into this strange-anew world should relegate us to the periphery of things. The Malaysians in this film are the extras, the bystanders and passers-by who don’t register for the most part.

When they do come into focus, however, they are as likely to be predatory as depraved, or both — like Chen’s seedy hag of an employer, who is apt to abuse her and meddle in her sexual intrigues. Or her employer’s callous brother, whose one fleeting appearance sees him trying to sell off the coffeeshop — again, it transpires, never mind if everyone is left in the lurch. Or the get-rich-quick, roadside scam artist who has Lee’s character beaten up when he fails to cough up money for the dubious service rendered.

The most striking Malaysian, though, is arguably the bedridden young man (also played by Lee), son of the lady boss and a vegetable completely dependent on others — Chen the domestic help, mostly.

Are these then metaphors for the Malaysian relationship with the migrant worker?

It seems probable, wouldn’t be shocking if it were, and you can’t say it isn’t a fitting counterpoint to the oft-repeated platitudes we make about how wonderful and caring we are. The doubling in Lee’s characters, of the homeless foreigner whose aimless nocturnal wanderings ends on a blissfully, sleepy note and the Malaysian, who remains unhappily bed-bound, certainly has the quality of the ironic.

The bed is a central motif here, and something that preoccupies the main characters one way or another.

It is a place of recuperation, of bonding and loving; conversely, it also doubles up as a place of terror, of debilitation and exploitation. This seems to be the delicate negotiation the characters must undertake in their quest to arrive at happy place.

The bed is also a great comic prop. Lee and Chen’s make-out scene towards the end is both erotically tense and laugh-out-loud funny, as they desperately suck mouth and choke in the great trans-migratory haze that has descended upon the city.

There is also much hilarity in the two bed-relocation scenes which have the characters hoisting an unwieldy, discarded mattress to and fro, hither and thither, up and down the streets of KL in the dead of night as if it were a great lifeline, which, in a sense, it is.

These post-Reformasi days, the parading of soiled bed on the street is rife with meaning: sexuality and persecution, to name just two. There is much that is grotty and ugly about Tsai’s film, and yet out of the sordidness and neglect chronicled, out of the decay and crumble depicted, there is tenderness and beauty and, yes, poetry.

The solace that Tsai’s three main characters finally find amid the nightmarish cityscape of his mind is both haunting and magical. The only bright light in these immigrants’ lives may be the cheap fibre-optic type lamp Lee uses to court Chen, but its twinkle is as luminous as the trio’s humanity.

In the end, the meaning of a Tsai Ming-liang film is as mysterious as dreams, but like dreams, you emerge from it wondrous, as from some secret place of the heart.