ReviewCannes 2021: Memoria movie review – Tilda Swinton in Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s near-unclassifiable film
- British actress Swinton plays a botanist in Colombia, Jessica, who begins a strange journey of self-discovery. ‘I think I’m going crazy,’ she says at one point
- At times excruciatingly slow, Apitchapong’s film is hard to classify and as idiosyncratic as you would expect from the Thai auteur filmmaker
3/5 stars
Memoria, the new film from Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, playing in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, begins with a strange and resonant thud.
The noise awakes Jessica (Tilda Swinton) from her slumber in Medellin, Colombia, and leaves the British botanist perturbed. It’s a noise that will come back to haunt her yet is unclassifiable – rather like Apitchatpong’s film.
Is it a ghost story? A film about madness? At one point, while visiting her sister (Agnes Brekke), who has been recuperating in hospital in Bogotá, Jessica tells her: “I think I’m going crazy.” This is more than borne out when she witnesses a dog stalk her in the street.
Even when she’s not there strangeness occurs, like a series of car alarms blaring, almost in unison. But most of all, it’s that sonorous noise – “like a rumble from the core of the earth”, she observes – that is heard sporadically throughout the film.
This description makes Memoria sound like a weird psychological thriller, but it’s far from that. If anything, it follows Jessica on an inward-looking quest of self-discovery, one she starts when she visits a sound engineer named Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), who tries to replicate the sound using his fancy equipment.