THUMP. A mysterious sound awakens Jessica (Tilda Swinton) in the middle of the night. She can’t locate its origin, or even describe its audible qualities in much detail. Audio engineer Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) helps craft a digital recreation of the noise, but his efforts don’t stop the original sound from occurring sporadically at moments when Jessica least expects it. She becomes increasingly aware of the fact that only she can hear this sound, checks in on her hospitalized sister, chats with a paleontologist, watches a band, and eventually bonds with an older man in the Colombian countryside, also named Hernán (Elkin Díaz). They have a surreal spiritual connection that allows them to share more intimately in an afternoon than most people do in their entire lives, and we eventually discover the source of the thump. It’s not what you’d expect.
That’s effectively all that narratively happens over almost two and a half hours of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria. If you had to categorize it according to traditional generic conventions, it’s closest to a ghost story, as Jessica is continually haunted—by the sound, by Hernán, by her sister’s illness (which, in an offbeat tangent, is implied to itself be an effect of a haunting by unreached Amazonians), and perhaps even by her own existence. But reducing the film to its minimalist plot is to do it a great disservice because it’s so fundamentally uninterested in telling a straightforward story. It’s not a wonder of visual aesthetics or performances, as its compositions are mostly naturally-lit and static, and its actors move softly, quietly, and slowly (one of the most memorable scenes is just a guy lying as still as humanly possible for what feels like an hour). Instead, it’s a film of concepts and tones—a poetic work of cinematic existentialism, seeking to be felt rather than enjoyed or even understood.
Art hinges on conflict, and film tends to manifest that conflict into narrative interruption. Memoria is all about interruption, but it’s more thematically concerned with interrogating the nature and feeling of interruption rather than using it as a plot-driving tool. In the film, memories and traumas of the past interrupt the characters’ presents, inhibiting their ability to progress with everyday life. In more abstract sequences divorced from human grounding, it also implies that life, both human and animal, seems to be an interruption of nature’s predisposition toward non-existence. And, most importantly, it’s a film grappling with how sounds interrupt silences.
Vast stretches play out with nothing but almost-still images of landscapes and empty rooms, sometimes soundtracked by dead silence, sometimes with a pitter-patter of rain and thunder. Its portraits of a humanless world rarely acknowledge any semblance of complex life at all—it might show lush greenery, but its soundscapes only occasionally permit the soft calls of birds and crickets. These hypnotic bursts of lifeless stillness are juxtaposed with similarly stationary shots of Bogotá’s bustling metropolis, full of pedestrians, car alarms, and vehicular backfires that disrupt the tranquility. It almost suggests that this might have been a more beautiful planet before single-celled organisms started moving around and making a ruckus. The film feels like a feature-length adaptation of that annoying thought experiment about a tree falling when nobody’s around.
The most transfixing scenes are those that embrace the disparity between simple visuals and complex audio—there are numerous long takes of Swinton sitting perfectly still and watching people make noise offscreen. We see her enjoy a jazz quartet and hear the dazzlingly complex music for minutes before we’re finally treated to visuals of the band, we witness her fascination with Hernán’s audio editing without seeing his computer screen, and we eavesdrop on dinner conversations with her as she stares at a menu over the sounds of a busy restaurant.
It’s through these complex soundscapes that the film meditates on its central fixation: the ways that humans try to contain, manipulate, and understand the natural world in order to make sense of their place within it. Characters try to sum up the science behind fungi in academic lectures, uncover early human history by studying fossils, freeze flowers in industrial-grade refrigerators, replicate primordial sounds using technology, and stare into massive glass encasements of grass and dirt. They all attempt to condense natural phenomena into comprehensible human terms—an important aim of the sciences, but also one of the driving forces of the arts.
The second half of the movie follows this thread by shifting into a more overtly emotional register, contemplating how people can capture or communicate feelings and memories through tangible media and physical movements that replicate those feelings and memories in others. The characters abstractly grapple with their relationships to space, objects, nature, and each other before ascending to a surreal plane of raw, manifested empathy.
If it sounds all over the place, that’s because it is. It offers no clear answers, and its questions are so opaque that it’s tough to fully register them all, let alone respond to them. But Memoria suggests that through science, art, and sound, perhaps we can begin to inch closer to appreciating our place in the natural universe, understanding the ties to our primal history, and genuinely connecting with our fellow humans—if we’re willing to sit still and listen.