Memoria

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul 

Running time: 2hr16 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Tilda Swinton stars in Memoria

This review first ran at the Cannes film festival

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work is a cinema of patience and profundity, of image-making that seeps into the soul and stays there. I have to confess that his work used not to be for me, that I greeted several of his films with a shrug and was outright driven up the wall by Palme d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. I’m not sure who has changed more, me or Weerasethakul (I suspect it’s me), but I connected with Memoria.

It’s the kind of cinema that leaves a lot of space for you, the viewer, and whatever it is that you’re bringing to the table, so it’s probably best approached by those in comfortable dialogue with their own thoughts. The plot concerns Tilda Swinton’s British botanist Jessica, visiting her sister in Colombia, who has been hearing a peculiar, inexplicable noise lately and would like to figure out what it is. The noise itself, which we experience alongside her, but nobody else can hear, is a masterpiece of sound design, a kind of deep metallic whomph best experienced in a good cinema; it would be a bit of a shame, and I think destroy one key scene altogether, to attempt this one on the majority of home set-ups. But sound design is not ultimately what the film is about, in its bones: the themes are time, death and and intergenerational memory. 

Throughout art history, wealthy patrons have commissioned memento mori, beautiful pieces of art that remind the beholder of their inevitable eventual death. Mary Queen of Scots, for example, had a watch in the shape of a skull with an engraving reading: “Pale death knocks with the same tempo upon the huts of the poor and the towers of Kings.” 

Memoria functions as a filmic equivalent, contemplating as it does the passage of time, and the artefacts that survive us all.

MEMORIA (2021) Written by Apichatpong Weerasethakul | Shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom | Edited by Lee Chatametikool