Memoria (2021)
Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul occupies a singular corner of world cinema, one that tends to divide audiences cleanly into the devoted and the bewildered. His work operates at a frequency all its own: unhurried, sensory, preoccupied with memory, landscape, and the thin membrane between the living and whatever comes after. His 2010 Palme d'Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives brought him to international attention, though it tested the patience of many a multiplex-trained viewer. Memoria, released in 2021, marks his first English-language feature and his first made outside Thailand, shot in Colombia with a largely South American supporting cast. That geographical transplant feels deliberate. Weerasethakul traded the humid forests and ghost-laced folklore of his homeland for the Colombian highlands and jungle, and the film carries a sense of respectful foreignness throughout, of a consciousness adrift in a landscape it can feel but never quite decode. Colombia itself is a country whose recent history is thick with silences and buried things, a context that gives the film's preoccupation with subterranean sound and ancient memory a quietly political undertow, even if the film wears that lightly.
The production is a genuinely international affair, assembled across co-producers from France, Germany, Mexico, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, with Weerasethakul's own Bangkok-based outfit Kick the Machine at the centre alongside long-time collaborator Illuminations Films. It is the sort of package that is common in arthouse European and festival cinema, where passion and prestige tend to substitute for conventional commercial backing. The budget was modest by any mainstream measure, though you would not know it from the images, which are polished but restrained, every frame composed with the care of someone who has thought long and hard about what to leave out. The casting of Tilda Swinton as Jessica, a Scottish botanist navigating a strange auditory affliction in Bogotá and beyond, was the film's one concession to marquee value. Swinton, of course, has built a career on exactly this kind of work: cerebral, physically present, willing to anchor a film through observation rather than conventional dramatic action. She brings an openness to bewilderment that few performers can manage without seeming lost. Alongside her, Colombian actor Jerónimo Barón and the veteran Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho provide grounding, each encounter Jessica has with them shifting the film's register in subtle but cumulative ways. Norwegian actor Agnes Brekke appears as Jessica's hospitalised sister, a thread that opens the story and then, characteristically for this director, does not go quite where you expect.
For those who want a companion piece from a different tradition but a similar instinct for landscape and atmosphere, Monos, the 2019 Colombian war film directed by Alejandro Landes, offers another vision of the Colombian wilderness as a place that reshapes whoever enters it. And for a film that plays with pure sensory immersion in a very different register, it is worth having a look at the site's review of Blue, Derek Jarman's 1993 meditation that asks how much weight sound and colour alone can carry a film.
I’ll be honest, this is only the second film I’ve watched by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, following Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which I wasn't a huge fan of. I’m also not typically a massive fan of Tilda Swinton. Yet, Memoria (2021) completely won me over. It follows Swinton as Jessica, a Scottish woman living in Colombia, caring for a sick relative while suffering from severe insomnia triggered by a mysterious, unplaceable sound. I should note right off the bat that this is essentially the slowest film I’ve ever seen, but I say that purely as an observation, not a criticism.
The film opens with an almost horror-like vibe. Those early scenes are genuinely unsettling, and going in blind, I half-expected a jump scare, finding myself holding my breath as the tension mounted. There were even a few moments, like the sudden car alarm scenes, that actually made me jump. At the time, they seemed totally random, but they make perfect, profound sense by the finale. Visually, the film is breathtaking. It indulges in long, wide-angle shots that slowly pan or remain completely stationary for minutes at a time. It wants you to absorb what you’re seeing, to feel, to connect, and to take in every sound, colour, and breath. While it can occasionally feel like an attack on the senses, by the end, you realise exactly why it matters.
There’s a quietly beautiful scene where sound engineers try to replicate the noise Jessica hears, perfectly capturing the sheer impossibility of coherently explaining an internal sensation to someone else. I had absolutely no idea where this film was heading until the finale, when every single puzzle piece beautifully clicked into place. I will warn you about those long, stationary scenes, but I truly feel they served a vital purpose in the grand scheme of the narrative. It feels like a perfect, alchemical mix between an Ingmar Bergman slow-burn and the Russian classic Stalker (two styles I actually don't care for at all) yet somehow, here, it absolutely works.
Memoria is a mesmerising, deeply sensory experience that demands your patience and rewards it tenfold. Highly recommended.
Memoria is, by any honest measure, not a film for every mood or every evening. It asks something real of its audience and offers nothing in the way of conventional satisfaction in return. But films that operate on this frequency, the ones that burrow into the senses and linger there for days afterwards, are rare enough to be worth taking seriously. Weerasethakul has made a film that feels less like a story told and more like a place visited, and the fact that it works as well as it does, even for viewers who have bounced off his previous work, says something about how precisely he has calibrated this particular outing. It is patient, peculiar, and unlike most things you will find on a streaming queue. Sometimes that is exactly what you need. Some films you watch, and some films you sit inside.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2026-06-16
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Memoria (2021) on YouTube
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