In some but not all of the screenings that have made up its limited and quite protracted release, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new feature Memoria is introduced by a new short. It’s no more than ten minutes long, and very Weerasethakul—made up of a series of long, stationary shots of lush jungles and rural scenes, taken on a two-month odyssey the experimental Thai master took through Colombia in 2017. It’s completely silent, and each scene is overlaid by cryptic drawings from his journals from the trip. The enigmatic short ends on a quote: “Sometimes there’s no escape except in dreams.”
In ten compact minutes, Weerasethakul introduces his audience to the major themes that will go on boring through to the core of the magnificent film to follow: sound (in the case of Memoria; silence in the case of the short), perception (the boundaries between memories, dreams, and the “reality” the camera captures are all smudged), and the double (those drawings and the scenes they interpret are often in a thrilling kind of conflict). Memoria itself is sleek and propulsive—the most compact film Weerasethakul has made. At times it approaches the eroticism of the thriller—the suspense which leaves you lightheaded, the quick cuts which take your breath, and the addictive mystery at the center of it all. But Memoria is no less the heavyweight in its formal and and conceptual accomplishments than Weerasethakul’s previous films, including especially the Palme d’Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Trimming the experimental fat off the corners of Memoria in fact illuminates new dimensions of Weerasethakul’s style, revealing a capacity to work within popular and genre constraints that just reaffirms the director’s untouchable standing in world cinema.
In the film, Swinton plays Jessica Holland, a Scottish botanist abroad in Bogotá, Colombia. She’s there at least in part to visit her sister (Agnes Brekke), who lies in a hospital bed, suffering from an inexplicable condition which causes her to fall in and out of consciousness. Jessica is awoken from a deep sleep in an early scene by a phenomenally loud noise. She wanders around the apartment in a daze, searching in vain for its source. As the film slowly unfurls the sound recurs, and recurs again. Jessica’s trip doesn’t seem to have much urgency or structure to it, so she starts organizing her days around investigating the sound. And as she investigates, she begins uncovering images, symbols, and stories that Weerasethakul arranges into complex, evocative patterns, not unlike the drawings from the pre-film short. But in Memoria, Weerasethakul builds with intention, subtly, gradually, until the arrangement takes on immense significance and foreboding power.
Jessica’s first numinous experience occurs at her sister’s bedside. The sound has only ripped out of the silence of her life once so far, but it sets an unsettling tone for both Jessica and the viewer. Her sister finally wakes from her comatose state and tells her about a terrible dream she had, about a dog who had been run over who refused to die. Jessica says nothing, goes on with her life, and while crossing the street one day, watches a man fall to the ground after they both, apparently only they two, hear the sound. She befriends a sound engineer named Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego—a wonderful performance, but not long for the film; he mysteriously vanishes halfway through), and spends an afternoon in his studio trying to recreate the sound based on her description. The closest she gets: “like a big ball of concrete that falls into a metal well surrounded by sea water.” At the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where she sometimes clacks away on a laptop, Jessica meets an archeologist, Agnes, played by the great Jeanne Balibar. Agnes has been investigating sets of skeletal remains unearthed by a local construction project that is boring a tunnel through the Earth, deep beneath their feet. One recovered skull of a little girl has its own hole bored into it—“they used to drill holes into the skull, thinking it would release bad spirits,” Agnes explains.
These fertile impressions are at first released into the film loosely, casually. They might’ve dissipated like dreams hours after waking, but they begin to take on a hysterical urgency as the sound drives Jessica out of her mind. As Jessica wades into the deep end, Weerasethakul doubles back, replicating but modifying ever so slightly every dream, sound, and story that we’ve seen and heard.
Jessica encounters a dog one night in a masterfully composed, high angle static shot. It follows her slowly around a public plaza, mirroring the undead dog from her sister’s dream. Jessica herself can’t sleep. She composes “a poem of the sleepless nights” that she recites to Agnes, which likens sleep to an escape, as the short film likened dreams to an escape. Jessica’s sister forgets about her own dream when Jessica brings it up one night over dinner. Instead she tells a story of a deep-jungle tribe, referred to as “the uncontactable,” who send their elders out every night to perform a ritual to bring harm to anyone who attempts to contact them, even if it’s in their minds. During this story, the sound rings out three times, each louder than the last, audible only to Jessica. It recalls the tribe who drilled through the girl’s skull, and foreshadows the mysterious man Jessica encounters at the end of the film. He spouts off all sorts of forgettable art house babble about sleep, dreams, and memory—the film’s only weak point—but even he is an enigmatic refraction of an aspect from the first half of the film. His name is Hernán.
The final moments of Memoria need to be seen to be believed. Even if they aren’t designed to be understood. At least not in the normal way. The first three quarters of the film are so symbolically charged they’re practically vibrating with life. Weerasethakul sends the mind on a chase through a slanted hall of mirrors, in which no two doubles are exactly alike. You can fold all the narrative digressions into a neat pattern, unfold it, cut holes in it, and rearrange it a million ways and still find a million more that tantalize. A scene which starts in the tunnel where the skeletons were discovered that pans up through layers of earth to show a group of kids dancing for one another caused a wave of goosebumps to erupt across my body. My God, I realized for the first time, everyone who has ever died is in the ground beneath me. Every life, experience, and history going back centuries is invariably reduced to dust, which builds by layers and forms the ground we walk on. These are the ecstatic epiphanies that can sometimes strike the patient viewer of an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film. Where they come from and how they’re achieved, that might be easiest to work out in dreams.