The Thai artist and film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul offers us his own kind of exaltation and his own abolition of gravity; he fixes you with his unbroken gaze and his meaning seems to float out of the screen – and you float out of your cinema seat to meet it. In a calmly realist, non-mystic movie language, this director really can convince you that the living and the dead, the past and the present, the terrestrial and the other, do exist side by side. Memoria is a beautiful and mysterious movie, slow cinema that decelerates your heartbeat.
For some, the andante tempo, with its glacially long silent takes, will exasperate – and opinions may divide on the extraordinary sci-fi epiphany ending. Even now I’m not sure what I think about it. But what originality and daring, the biggest ideas invoked with compelling zen humility. Weerasekathul is an artist who demands that you return your thoughts to the unsolved and unspoken mysteries of existence: that we are born, live, die and all without ever knowing why, or often even wanting to know. But he approaches these phenomena as calmly as he might questions of agriculture or engineering.
This is the first movie that Weerasethakul has made outside Thailand and with a non-Thai cast. The setting is Colombia, and Tilda Swinton plays Jessica, an expatriate Englishwoman who lives in Medellín running a market-gardening business selling flowers; she is in Bogotá visiting her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke) and her husband, Juan (Daniel Giménez Cacho, from Lucrecia Martel’s Zama), because Karen is ill in hospital with a mysterious respiratory complaint. One night, Jessica is awoken from a sleep by a strange bang or sonic boom. What is going on? There is no building work nearby. And apparently only Jessica can hear this sound.
She goes out for dinner at a restaurant with Karen and Juan, and she hears the sound again, as clear as gunshots, but realises that no one else is aware of them, so she just has to keep talking. It is one of the most disturbing scenes I have seen recently at the movies. The sounds appear to be presentiments or symptoms of some profound shift in the world, and she has been singled out as the only person aware of them – a strange annunciation. Can this perhaps have something to do with the ancient bones that have been dug up in the city? Or is that Jessica is entering some metempsychotic breakdown?
She visits the student of a friend in a recording studio: Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) and asks him if he can recreate the noise digitally, which he does and then plays her the music that he is working on. They seem to be on the verge of some kind of romantic relationship, when she arrives at the studio to be told by baffled engineers that no such person of that name has ever worked there. But later she is to encounter an older man, also called Hernán (Elkin Diaz) who may be his doppelganger spirit and who, like Funes the Memorious in the Borges story, says he has never left his village because he remembers everything that has ever happened to him and cannot risk being overwhelmed. As she talks to this older Hernán, recovered memories arise into her consciousness, as if tuning into a long-lost radio frequency. But are they her memories?
Memoria is an out-of-body experience that you have to build up to, step by step. All admirers of this director, with his enigmatic realist-mystic masterpieces such as Tropical Malady and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives will know broadly what to expect. But he is still capable of astonishing you, all over again. I’m not being facetious when I say that watching this film reminded me of when I was 17, hearing Revolution 9 on The White Album for the first time. It left a residue of happiness in my heart.
• Memoria is released on 14 January in the UK.
