Review - MEMORIA — Interlocutor

What does it take to sell out an art house movie theater on New Year’s Day in the middle of the latest pandemic surge of the Omicron variant? Apparently the sublime promise of a metaphysical cinematic journey that many who were in attendance that evening may never have the opportunity to repeat.

Thai film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton, played a short theatrical run at New York City’s IFC Center in late December 2021, ending on New Year’s Day. The film will be making a very limited city-by-city theatrical tour, with claims by its distributors that it will never be available for streaming or via any other medium, aside from the way it probably should only be viewed: within the confines of a darkened theater with a very good sound system.

The large crowd in attendance at this 6:50 pm January 1 screening was the quietest most attentive audience I have ever seen any film with — no whispering/talking, no visible cell phone screens, not even the crunches of any popcorn or other snack chewing (the masks everyone wore helped to prevent this). Everyone sat eerily still. Indeed, when the credits rolled and the audience began to file out in a kind of stunned silence, there seemed to be an air of reverence, almost as if everyone were exiting a long and immersive religious ceremony.

Memoria is not a film which provides anything customary: no easily discernible plot, characterizations, expositions, or even a hint of a conventional sense of conflict or ultimate resolution. Instead, it’s a full audio visual baptism that is closer to a psychedelic drug experience or an extremely vivid dream than anything resembling a linear presentation of a story with a clear arc. It comes at you from multiple directions, with a logic all its own that is open to interpretation from multiple perspectives, and no two people will likely experience it in quite the same way. It’s cinema at its most demanding yet arguably also its most rewarding, if you’re willing to just be swept up by it and let it present itself to you on its own terms. In the similar sense of a psychedelic experience, your own current mindset and present environment and company will likely heavily influence the way it impacts you.

Swinton plays a Scottish woman named Jessica living an expatriate life in Colombia. She appears to be a botanist running a commercial flower-growing operation. Jessica lives in Medellín but is staying in Bogotá visiting her sister Karen, who has been hospitalized with some sort of debilitating illness which keeps her unconscious for long periods.

While staying in her hotel, Jessica is suddenly awakened by a fast and heavy booming sound. She then begins a personal quest to discover the origin of the sound, which no one else can hear. However, the boom seems to be resonating on another wavelength that can possibly be deciphered by other “receivers.”

One enigmatic scene out of many shows a parking lot full of cars gradually reacting with blaring alarms, set off one after the other, before ceasing their blaring one after the other in equally slow succession. That’s all we’re shown, but the scene underscores a sense of something mysterious resonating just beneath the surface of “ordinary” reality. This uncanny tone permeates every shot of the film. It’s a strange tension or discordance humming just beneath the surface of otherwise ordinary-seeming views of urban and lush forest environments.

Jessica seeks the expertise of a sound engineer named Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego). She tries to get him to replicate the boom as closely as possible — in her halting Spanish, she attempts to explain that it’s like a large concrete ball that drops into a metal well surrounded by seawater. After a few tweaks on his sound board, he manages to create a synthesized boom which Jessica deems sufficiently “earthy,” and he saves the sound file. But later, when Jessica returns to the studios to try to locate Hernán, she is told that no one by that name or description has ever worked there.

Whether or not the young sound engineer “exists,” though, hardly matters. The booms that haunt Jessica are leading her towards some connection with a much greater elemental aspect of her identity, or even towards a deeper connection to some other layer of reality normally hidden but still vibrating everywhere, if one can only tune into the correct perceptual frequency.

Tilda Swinton and Juan Pablo Urrego in *Memoria* - NEON

I was completely unfamiliar with Weerasethakul’s work before viewing Memoria, but on the following night I watched his 2010 film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which won the Palm d’Or at Cannes that year. Uncle Boonmee is just as preternatural and confounding as Memoria, but watching it helped me understand that this is a filmmaker who is most interested in presenting film as a prismatic experience. His features are more like long form video installations shown in museums or galleries than anything else, and unsurprisingly he has widely exhibited multimedia work in galleries around the world.

In Memoria, Jessica seems unperturbed that the sound engineer has vanished, and she continues her quest, but it doesn’t even appear that discovering the origins of the sound itself is her main goal. Something more ephemeral is guiding her. She consults with an anthropologist and examines an ancient skull and bones. Later she is drawn out of the city and meets with a rural doctor who teasingly asks if she’s seeking Xanax before offering up a cure of Jesus instead (then she ultimately appears to prescribe the Xanax anyway).

Finally, Jessica wanders out into the jungle where she encounters a middle-aged man (Elkin Díaz) cleaning fish near a brook. He tells her that his name is Hernán. Jessica is very momentarily, almost imperceptibly taken aback that he has the same name as the audio engineer, but the interaction between them which follows fully underscores a synchronicity between earlier events and her meeting with this older Hernán.

Tilda Swinton and Elkin Díaz in *Memoria* - NEON

This fisherman implies that he is not an ordinary person, that he remembers everything that has ever happened to him (along with some events that haven’t happened to him), and that he wound up in his current form after a long traversing through space and time. This conversation unfolds with such naturalism and gravitas that what could otherwise be an almost hokey sci-fi expository scene is presented with such subtlety and genuine emotion, it comes to make perfect sense in the world of this film that Jessica and this version of Hernán have met in an almost preordained fashion.

The long, careful, contemplative final scenes between Jessica and the older Hernán contain a mysterious intimacy that recall the mysticism of a Tarkovsky film but with its own distinct directorial touch that is difficult to articulate. This is a film that just has to be seen rather than read about, and better yet, it needs to be heard. Trying to explain it any further waters down its magic in the same manner that trying to explain a striking dream to someone always undermines its original gripping power. So watch it if you can, and if you hear a startling boom late in the dark of night, maybe this film is about to find its own way to you.