Memoria Memoria

* * * * PG 2021/2022, Drama, 2h 16m

A woman from Scotland, while traveling in Colombia, begins to notice strange sounds. Soon she begins to think about their appearance.

Memoria finds writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul branching out into English-language filmmaking without forsaking any of his own lyrical cinematic vocabulary.

Stars Tilda Swinton Elkin Díaz Jeanne Balibar

Official Trailer

Review

89% TOMATOMETER
40% AUDIENCE SCORE

Reviewed by JAKE WILSON

It could happen to anyone: while walking down the street, or in some other commonplace situation, you hear a short, sharp sound out of nowhere. A car backfiring , perhaps. But what if it's something different, even a cause for alarm? What if you can't be sure?

This is not just the starting point but practically the entire narrative motor of Memoria, the first feature in six years from the singular Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Cemetery of Splendour), and his first made outside his native Thailand.

Tilda Swinton plays Jessica, a Scottish florist staying in Colombia who is woken one morning by a mysterious noise, the source of which she sets out to track. Sleep is one of Apichatpong's great subjects, and his films themselves feel like dreams, calm and troubled at once. Part of what he has typically been dreaming about is the recent history of Thailand - which means his films are also political, in an oblique but definite sense.

Now he's operating far from home, in a country with its own apparently separate troubled history. Jessica is from somewhere else again, but his quest parallels hers in that both are seeking some form of connection with what may be beyond understanding.

Not that Memoria is a character study in any psychological sense. Swinton is used partly as a " guest star' ' (as Tilda Swinton, in other words), and partly for her technical ability to control her voice and gestures without overt heightening. Some of this can be linked to what we might perceive as her upper-class British traits: a knack for understatement and for " correct' ' behaviour. But Apichatpong has his own version of her invisible precision.

Everything in Memoria is far more calculated than you might first suspect - above all its sounds, which are not just the subject of the film but its substance, finely textured in ways that seem intended to bypass the conscious mind. So little outwardly happens in Memoria, you might almost wonder if it's a narrative film at all. In fact, it's the most linear piece of storytelling Apichatpong has given us, a mystery that turns the increasingly obsessive Jessica into a detective of sorts.

There is even something of Hitchcock in his ability to string us along, making us search for clues about where we might be headed.

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