Memories of a Burning Body (2024)
★½ — Memories of a Burning Body (2024)
Look, I'll be honest with you: I went into Memories of a Burning Body fully expecting to get it. The ratings were high, the buzz was strong, and it was my Costa Rica pick for the A-Z World Movie Tour, so I was genuinely curious. What I got was nearly two hours of watching the clock.
The film is structured as a docufiction, which is a format I find genuinely interesting when it's done well. Three women, spanning different generations of their lives, sharing memories and experiences. On paper, that's compelling. In practice, at least for me, it flatlined pretty quickly and never really recovered.
I want to be careful here, because I've had a proper think about why it left me so cold. Part of me wonders whether I'm simply not the right audience for it. This is a deeply intimate story told from the perspective of women moving through youth, middle age and beyond, and maybe as a bloke sitting down with it on a Tuesday night I was always going to struggle to find my way in. That's not a criticism of the film, that's me being honest about my own limitations as a viewer. But even granting all of that, I still have to trust my gut reaction, and my gut said: this isn't working.
The one thing I genuinely cannot argue with is the cinematography. It's beautiful. Whoever was behind the camera knew exactly what they were doing, and there are individual shots that linger. If you put a frame from this film in front of me, I'd probably think I was about to watch something special. The problem is that beauty alone isn't enough to carry a film for me. I need to feel something, or think something, or at the very least feel awake. And I spent a good chunk of Memories of a Burning Body just waiting for a moment to grab me.
The docufiction format, rather than adding texture and immediacy, actually created a distance I couldn't bridge. I kept feeling like I was watching people talk about a film rather than watching the film itself. The blurring of the documentary and fictional modes can be electric when the tension between them is exploited, but here it felt more like a structural choice that was made and then left to sit, without being pushed anywhere particularly surprising.
I've seen other films tackle women's experiences and generational memory in ways that genuinely floored me. Mustang is one that absolutely destroyed me, and that's also a story centred on female experience told with unflinching intimacy. The difference there was urgency. Every scene felt like it mattered. Here, I couldn't get that sense of stakes to click into place.
The high praise this film has received is real and I don't want to be dismissive of the people who loved it. Clearly something is resonating with a lot of viewers, and I suspect for the right person, in the right frame of mind, this could be a genuinely moving experience. But I have to call it as I find it, and what I found was a film that looked gorgeous and then largely left me behind.
One and a half stars. A disappointment, and not one I'm in any rush to revisit.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2025-06-09
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video
Buy: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Fandango At Home
Buy: Amazon Video · Fandango At Home
Physical: Amazon US
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