28 | New Scientist | 8 January 2022
Views Culture
Film
Memoria
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
UK c i nemas f rom 14 Ja nua r y“IN THIS town, there are a lot of
people who have hallucinations,”
a doctor tells Jessica (Tilda
Swinton) at the beginning
of Memoria. Then, in a neat
encapsulation of the mix of the
mystical and the medicinal that
runs throughout this strange
and heady film, she prescribes
the tranquilliser Xanax while
advising her patient not to take
it in case it inhibits her ability to
savour the beauty of the world.
Jessica is a British botanist in
Colombia who wakes one night
to a heavy thumping noise that
is loud enough to set off car
alarms. When it becomes apparent
that no one else heard it, it sends
her on a downwards spiral into
anxiety. She can find no obvious
source and continues to hear
the noise regularly, while no
one else can. Jessica travels from
city to jungle to try to work out
what it all means, getting caught
up in deep and sometimes
disturbing questions about
the nature of reality.
The film-maker himself,
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, had
exploding head syndrome – a rare
sleep disorder in which people
are woken by the sensation of an
(imagined) loud noise. Yet while
his experience of this strange
and unexplained condition was
part of the inspiration for the
story, Memoria is defiantly
unempirical, more interested
in how something might feel
than what might have caused it.
As she investigates the strange
noise, Jessica meets and befriends
Agnes, an anthropologist who is
examining a newly unearthedthousand-year-old skeleton of a
young girl with a hole in her skull:
probably “a ritual” to release evil
spirits, the scientist reasons.
She also meets a sound
engineer called Hernàn, who
tries to replicate the sound inside
her head with a catalogue of
absurd cinema sound effects like
“stomach hit wearing hoodie”,
while Jessica explains that it
is more like “a ball of concrete
hitting a metal wall surrounded
by seawater” and “a rumble
from the core of the Earth”.
Hernàn puts the sound that
comes closest to music with his
band, and Jessica listens to it with
headphones on and a wry smile.
The audience cannot hear the
music and it is a typically oblique
move from Weerasethakul, who
won the Palme d’Or at Cannes
in 2010 for the equally
enthralling Uncle Boonmee
Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
Memoria is Weerasethakul’s
first film set outside his home
nation of Thailand, and it is
essentially a meditation onsister, to Agnes, but the camera
always stays far away and static,
shots so long, calm and still that
the film envelops you instead
of talking at you like most do.
It is a considered exercise
in empathy and patience, a
commitment between the camera
and its audience as much as
between people and generations.
In its second half, Jessica visits
an anthropological dig at Bogotá
and there she meets a different
Hernàn, a man who claims to
remember everything. “I try
to limit what I see,” he says,
“experiences are harmful.”
As Jessica and the new Hernàn
commune over coffee and pastoral
meditations on life and death,
memory becomes a fluid thing,
a shared thing, as if we are all
part of some collective experience.
It is surreal and moving.
An abrupt change of direction
in the finale feels like quite
a U-turn and won’t be to
everybody’s tastes, but overall
Memoria is measured and deeply
felt. This is slow cinema to see
on a big screen and get lost in. ❚Francesca Steele is a journalist
based in Londoninterconnectedness. What
does the past mean to modern
life? Do we carry the memory
of it, and of each other, with
us somehow? And when
things get weird, what should
we pathologise and fix
and when should we just try
to understand ourselves better?
In doing this, Memoria isn’t
didactic. Weerasethakul is askingquestions, not answering them,
and he seems to be aware of how
lofty and pretentious it may all
appear. Jessica laughs when she
hears that Hernàn’s band is called
The Depth of Delusion Ensemble,
welcome levity that creates an
unusual tone, feeling at once
preternatural and realistic.
Memoria pushes people away
before pulling them close. Swinton
appears frail, nervy but curious.
She talks carefully, urgently to
Hernàn (whom later she discovers
no one else has heard of), to herNE
ONRumble in the jungle
When a woman hears loud noises that no one else can detect, it kicks off a
surreal and immersive journey into human memory, says Francesca SteeleJessica searches every
corner of Colombia for
the source of the noise“ What should we
pathologise and fix
and when should we
just try to understand
ourselves better?”