Memoria (2021)
There's a moment early in Memoria where Tilda Swinton's character jolts awake at a sound nobody else seems to hear, a deep, resonant thud that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, and I genuinely wasn't sure what kind of film I was watching. Horror? Thriller? Something else entirely? I held my breath waiting for a jump scare that never came, and by the time I exhaled, I realised I was already under the film's spell.
I'll be upfront about where I was coming from going into this. Apichatpong Weerasethakul is only the second time I've sat with his work, the first being Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which I wasn't a huge fan of. And I'll be equally honest: I've never really clicked with Tilda Swinton as a screen presence. So the fact that Memoria won me over as completely as it did feels like something worth saying loudly.
Swinton plays Jessica, a Scottish woman living in Colombia, caring for a sick relative while being slowly unravelled by severe insomnia. The cause, as far as she can pin it down, is a sound. A specific, inexplicable sound that seems to originate somewhere inside her own skull. The film follows her as she tries to locate it, describe it, understand it, and perhaps survive it.
This is, I should say straight away, essentially the slowest film I've ever seen. I mean that as pure observation rather than complaint. Weerasethakul works in long, wide-angle shots that hold their position for minutes at a time, asking you not to watch but to sit inside the frame with the characters. To breathe. To listen. To absorb colour and sound and silence in equal measure. It can feel, at points, like a mild assault on your patience, but the film earns every second of it by the end.
There's a quietly stunning scene where Jessica sits with a sound engineer as he attempts to build her mysterious thud from scratch on his equipment, layering frequencies and textures, trying to manufacture a sensation she can't even properly articulate. It's one of the most precise depictions I've seen of that particular human frustration: the sheer impossibility of translating something entirely internal into words someone else can grasp. It stuck with me long after the credits.
And those car alarm moments, abrupt and startling and seemingly random, they did make me jump. Both times. But what I appreciated, looking back, is that nothing in this film is random. Every seemingly wayward detail locks into place during a finale that I did not see coming, not even slightly, and which recontextualised everything I'd watched before it in the most quietly profound way.
I kept thinking, as I watched, of two filmmakers whose work I'll confess I don't particularly get on with: Ingmar Bergman in his most interior, glacial mode, and the Russian tradition exemplified by something like Stalker. Memoria feels like it was distilled from both of those wells, and yet somehow, here, the formula works on me in a way those films don't. Maybe it's because Weerasethakul roots the strangeness in something so bodily and immediate: a sound, a sleepless woman, a country that feels both lush and slightly unreal. The atmosphere in Colombia is thick enough to touch, and the film uses that landscape not as backdrop but as active participant. It reminded me a little of the disorienting, immersive quality I felt watching Monos, that same sense of a physical world pressing in on the characters from all sides.
I won't pretend Memoria is for everyone. If you need narrative momentum to stay engaged, this might genuinely test you. But if you can surrender to its rhythm, it becomes something close to hypnotic. The patience it demands is precisely the point: the film is asking you to experience, in some small way, what it feels like to be hyper-attuned to sensation, to be unable to switch off, to live inside sound.
Four stars. Mesmerising, deeply sensory, and far more rewarding than I ever expected. Highly recommended, but go in knowing what you're signing up for.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2026-06-16
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