Jessica (Tilda Swinton), travels to Columbia to meet her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke) who has fallen ill.  One morning, Jessica is jolted awake by a loud, singular bang that rattles through her body, yet only she can hear.  She meets with Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), a sound technician, who helps recreate the sound. Her journey towards discovery eventually leads her to an older fisherman (Elkin Díaz) who lives alone in the jungle and may have some insight as to the source of the strange sound. 

Apichatpong Weerasethakul directs Memoria, a 136-minute feature for release by Neon in an ongoing roadshow format with no plans for a physical release. The bold but infuriating release pattern aside, the film is an equally confounding experience that leaves itself wide open for interpretation. It is the director’s first film outside of his native Thailand, but his style is as present as ever with long instances of his camera taking in the creeping action and a story that slowly reveals itself in ways that reject most of the traditional narrative conventions. That being said, the story of Memoria is rather straightforward despite the haunting tone and the dreamlike atmosphere.  

It is set up almost like a horror film, not so dissimilar to the paranoid landscape traversed by Mia Farrow in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), but Swinton – and by extension Weerasethakul – are not out to paint a picture of a mentally fractured woman.  There are many instances where we learn with Jessica that things that she had been told or even seen are all of a sudden not true, but it does not feel like gaslighting here because Memoria is not that kind of story.  Rather, it is one about discovery. These revelations are not done with malice, but simply as a matter of fact, and as such Jessica takes them all in stride. Together, we recalibrate our understanding of the world we are in as we continue on the journey to uncover the source of the sound. 

There is a point early on in the film where Jessica is meeting with Hernán to help recreate the sound. It is this scene here that starts to inform us of what Weerasethakul is trying to do as we strive to remember with Jessica what the sound was like. It is earthy, it is rumbling, less metal, more bass, and then finally we arrive at it once again. BANG! The immediate sense memory rattles through us, jolting us awake from our own sleep. For some, maybe it wakens them physically for Weerasethakul’s work can act as a lullaby of sorts in its composition, but for those more attuned to his voyeuristic approach, this second occurrence of the sound awakens us to what Weerasethakul is up to with Memoria. 

Jessica’s resulting journey is one that weaves, seemingly, through space and time. Inspired by a conversation she has with Agnes (Jeanne Balibar), an archeologist, who shows Jessica the skull of a young girl who died in a ritual some 6,000 years earlier, she makes her way into the jungle where she meets the older fisherman. This is the moment Weerasethakul has been working towards in this unique take on a time-bending tale. It is not ouroboric as is often seen, nor is it a true intersection as this story plays out on a single timeline, but it is as if that timeline had been folded in on itself, again and again, and the multiple layers are set to overlay with Jessica at the center of them. She is experiencing past, present, and future all at the same time, but where other filmmakers would follow the conventions of explaining the “why” and the “how” of it all, Weerasethakul simply tips his hand enough for us to unlock the “what” and leaves us to grapple with the rest.      

Like Weerasethakul’s previous works, Memoria is best experienced as a wave that rolls over the audience and is then reflected on to find understanding.  To try and rush the answer is a fool’s errand as Weerasethakul keeps Memoria’s secrets close to the heart until he is ready to reveal them in those final sequences as he so often does.  Even then, he leaves much open for interpretation so that audiences can apply their own life experiences to the film. It can be seen, in a way, as the history of the world filtered through the memory of Jessica, a woman who has through a connection to the past seen into the future. For the uninitiated, Memoria can be a frustrating experience, but similar to how the sound is the key to Jessica unlocking her memories, Memoria is a key that unlocks a deeper understanding of Weerasethakul’s previous works, too; a thesis of sorts into how he views our human connection to the world that came before us and the world that will continue long after we have faded from its memory.