Direction: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Country: Colombia / Thailand / other
In Memoria, the most recent film by Thai writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Recalls His Past Lives, 2010; Cemetery of Splendor, 2015), Tilda Swinton plays Jessica Holland, a Scottish woman in search for the meaning of hearing a particular sound in Bogotá, Colombia. She left Medellin, where she lives, to visit her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke), who is in the hospital with an unidentified illness. One night she wakes up in the middle of the night due to a sudden, intense bang that repeats the following days. Insomniac, she decides to go after it.
At once sensory and spiritual, this contemplative mystery of a movie plays like a journey filled with uncanny signs, philosophical quests, and revealing encounters. No one can guess where it leads. The spoken language may have changed but Weerasthekul’s cinematic attributes remain strangely hypnotic. Although uncreepy, the film probes otherworldly interactions and references past lives with a perceptive lyrical sense. It’s about life and death; past and present; animism and trauma; about how humans connect with each other and the multiple mysteries of the universe.
More than mind-blowing, Memoria is an original piece of cinema that, keenly shot and oddly paced, rewards patient viewers with an openness to the intangible. If cinema is about being transported to another realm and dimension, Weerasethakul is unrivaled as a helmsman.
