With his assured but deeply unpleasant debut feature, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, the British director Thomas Clay established his credentials as both a cineaste with a defiantly arthouse tastes and an arch provocateur. The artfully photographed ultra-violence garnered plenty of news headlines and rather fewer positive reviews when the film premiered in Critic’s Week in Cannes 2005. Clay drew comparisons to the arthouse enfants terrible Bruno Dumont and Gaspar Noi. A British director, he had a decidedly un-British sensibility.

With his second feature, Soi Cowboy, the 28-year-old Clay distances himself geographically as well as stylistically from his British roots. Shot entirely in Thailand, where Clay now lives, the film is divided into two distinct parts, perhaps as a nod towards Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady. The first segment, shot in rather lifeless black and white, observes the mundane minutiae of the lives of a bloated Danish ex-pat and his pregnant, childlike Thai girlfriend. The man, played by Nicholas Bro, is a film - maker – presumably he is Clay’s alter-ego, although what that says about his life in Thailand is debatable. The couple live together in a cramped apartment but it feels more like a convenient co-existence than a relationship. Clay favours long takes and an almost static camera, but he seems less confident in what to do with it than he was in his first film. At one point, during an interminable, wordless breakfast scene, the camera starts to drift gradually, almost imperceptibly, before coming to rest, inexplicably, on a toaster.

Through the quotidian dullness of the couple’s daily life, we piece together a picture of a partnership based on a kind of commerce. She gets to escape the girly bars of Bangkok’s Soi Cowboy; he gets to pop Viagra then stare hopefully at her back as she curls away from him in bed at night. Towards the end of the segment, the couple take a trip to the temples of Ayutthaya and there, when both take on the status of tourists, there seems to be a glimpse of a proper relationship rather than just a business deal. But Clay takes a long time to say very little in this part of the film.

After the stultifying austerity of the first segment, the saturated colours and the jerky hand - held camera of the second part come as a relief. Stylistically, it’s more rewarding. Set among the rural poor, the story demonstrates how much less a life is worth if the cushion of money is not there to protect it. A young man returns home, on the orders of his mafia boss, to kill his brother for some unspecified sin. However, his own life is worth little more. The couple from the first part reappear but as different characters to highlight the film’s less than profound insight that a wrong turn somewhere in life can have devastating ramifications.

Clay doesn’t let us forget his self-appointed auteur status, name-checking his own first film alongside David Lynch’s Inland Empire. But there is little sign of his supposed genius in this pretentious, fraudulent film.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010