Memoria Review: Tilda Swinton Elevates This Elusive, Surreal Drama
Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is known for the dream-like, slow-burn tint that is wrapped around his cinematic oeuvre, be it Tropical Malady or Cemetery of Splendor. His Memoria embraces a similar aura, creating a window into a world that feels ephemeral and timeless all at once while etching an audio-visual synesthesia like no other. Steeped in soundscapes that soothe and unsettle, Memoria unfurls like a fever dream about memory, displacement, and the mysteries of existence.
What Memoria intrinsically means, or in simpler words, what it is about, is difficult to articulate in words. Not only is the film richly layered and wildly interpretative, but also one that is bound to resonate in deeply personal ways with the viewer or not at all, given the glacial nature of most scenes. Memoria opens with almost ten minutes of night-time silence, punctuated by a sudden, rumbling sound that wakes Jessica (Tilda Swinton) from her slumber. The exact nature of the sound is unknown, and she gets up to investigate the source but is unable to fully comprehend it. The deathlike silence of the night is once again pierced by a chain of car alarms, which stops as suddenly as it begins, cementing the unusual, hypnotic sensory experience that defines the core of Memoria.
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Jessica resides in Medellín but is currently visiting her ill sister in Bogotá, who is an archaeologist involved in a century-long excavation project adjacent to the Andes mountains. Wishing to delve deeper into the source of the sound (which she starts hearing quite erratically), Jessica approaches sound technician Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), who attempts to recreate the sound by putting together
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