Memoria is an immersive cinematic creation it deserves an equally immersive viewing experience to fully enjoy it.Jessica (Tilda Swinton) consults an engineer (Juan Pablo Urrego) in an effort to understand the mysterious sound she's hearing in Memoria. Both moments had me on the edge of my seat on first watch, and the revelations Weerasethakul drops in the final act had me yelping with excitement. Yes, one of its most thrilling scenes involves Jessica sitting in a room, listening to various sounds with an engineer another sees her merely sitting at a table, in meditative congress with a man she meets in the countryside.
It’s the kind of movie you need to be locked in a dark room with, while obsessing over its idiosyncratic details and sharing your curiosity with an engaged audience.
Memoria was one of my favorite films of 2021, but I cannot imagine it having the same power on a small screen, given its languorous pace. Beyond that, it’s a way to compel people to see the movie projected on a big screen.
The plan guarantees that the film will be available in more than just the biggest cities with robust art-house theaters. Rather than receiving the traditional limited release and online rollout that many acclaimed international movies get, Memoria will be traveling around the country road-show-style, playing exclusive one-week engagements in cinemas all the way into the fall. The unorthodox release strategy for Memoria, which is finally unfurling in the United States this month after COVID-19 delays, therefore makes sense. Weerasethakul’s movies have a trancelike quality, sometimes practically encouraging the viewer to nod off for a couple minutes, but very few artists like him are working in cinema today. His best-known work, the Palme d’Or–winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, is an elegiac consideration of a man’s final days as he speaks with ghostly figures that emerge from the jungle it’s kooky and serene stuff, in which someone might converse about day-to-day existence with a catfish. That approach is a hallmark of Weerasethakul’s filmmaking, which commonly blends fantasy narratives with queries about the pressures of modern existence. But Memoria still offers more answers than one might expect, even if they are fanciful and oblique. Weerasethakul is not a plot-heavy storyteller, and this is not a thriller with a dark scheme waiting to be uncovered. As she digs deeper to try to define her noise, Jessica, a Scottish expat, travels throughout Colombia, where she runs a flower business, moving between Medellín, Bogotá, and the countryside in search of answers.
In another sequence, at night, stationary cars in a parking lot start to beep their alarms one by one, as if roused by some unseen force.Īll of these scenes, plus many other disconnected moments throughout the movie, feel like “glitches in the Matrix,” the kinds of oddities that can pile up without any real explanation. But the strangeness of his behavior cannot be immediately dismissed. One person dives to the ground in fear and then runs away when he realizes his error, possibly out of embarrassment. Not long after hearing the thud for the first time, Jessica is crossing the street when she hears another bang-only this time, it’s a bus backfiring, and everyone around her freezes with surprise as well. Read: High Life is a tender story of existential terror Weerasethakul is unpacking a sensation everyone has probably experienced at one point in their life: the feeling that something is cosmically out of whack. But the existential mystery of Memoria is universally applicable. Jessica’s aural odyssey, set in Colombia, has real-life inspiration-Weerasethakul has suffered from “ exploding head syndrome,” the very cinematic-sounding sleep disorder that involves hallucinating loud noises. “It’s like … a big ball of concrete … that falls into a metal well … which is surrounded by seawater,” Jessica tells a sound engineer, trying to describe the unusual clang so that he can re-create it for her. That story line might read like mundane horror, but Weerasethakul’s films are not so easily pegged to one genre Jessica’s journey encompasses romance, family drama, science fiction, and deep philosophical debate. Over the next two hours and 15 minutes, Jessica tries to understand what it is that she keeps hearing, a distracting noise seemingly perceptible only to her. The vague sound stirs Jessica Holland (played by Tilda Swinton) from her sleep and then begins to haunt her. The first thing the viewer hears in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria is a loud but distant thud.