Memoria: Weerasethakul's Sonic Mystery

The first thing that happens in Memoria (2021) is a noise. Jessica Holland, a Scottish woman living in Colombia, wakes in the dark, and there is a sound: a low, dense, concussive thud, something between a concrete ball dropping into a metal well and a very distant detonation. It has no source. Nobody else hears it. It comes back, at intervals, for the next two hours, and it will come back in your chest rather than your ears if you are in a room with a decent system, because Apichatpong Weerasethakul and his sound team built it to.

That premise is the entire film, and describing it flatly makes it sound like a thin conceit. It is one of the most rigorous horror pictures of the decade, and it is barely ever described as horror.

Apichatpong left Thailand to make it — his first feature shot outside the country, in Colombia, in Spanish and English, with Tilda Swinton in the lead. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2021, sharing the award with Nadav Lapid’s Ahed’s Knee. The director has said in interviews that the sound is drawn from something he himself experienced, a condition sometimes called exploding head syndrome, in which sleepers hear a violent noise that has no external cause. Knowing that changes very little about the film and explains a great deal about its patience.

The hunt for a sound

Jessica grows orchids and has come to Bogotá because her sister is ill in hospital. She keeps hearing the bang. Her response is the most interesting decision in the script: she treats it as an engineering problem. She goes to a university sound studio and finds a young engineer, Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), and asks him to build the noise for her from a library of samples.

The scene that follows is the best thing Apichatpong has ever filmed and one of the best sequences of the 2020s. Swinton describes the sound in ordinary, groping language — bigger, rounder, more earthy, less metal — and the engineer adjusts, and plays it back, and adjusts again. It is a woman attempting to render an interior experience into a shareable object, in real time, through a mixing desk, and it is filmed almost entirely in long takes of two people listening. Nothing about it should work as cinema. It is riveting.

Later Jessica sits with an archaeologist, Agnès (Jeanne Balibar), who is examining human remains uncovered by a tunnel excavation through a mountain, and later still she meets an older man in a village, also called Hernán (Elkin Díaz), who scales fish by a river and says that he remembers everything and therefore never leaves.

Why it works: sound as the protagonist

The craft argument is unambiguous here, because the film is a sound-design film with pictures attached. Apichatpong’s mix, worked up with his long-time collaborator Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, does three things in sequence.

First, it establishes an unusually quiet baseline. Bogotá is present as traffic and birds and air-conditioning, and the levels sit low, so the room you are in becomes part of the film’s acoustic. Second, it places the bang without any visual cue whatsoever, and crucially without a cut. The sound arrives inside an ongoing shot, and Swinton flinches, and the shot continues. There is no editorial acknowledgement. Third, and this is the cruel part, it teaches you to anticipate. Once you have been hit four or five times, every quiet stretch becomes an ambush corridor, and the film simply lets you sit in that state for long minutes at a time.

That is exactly the mechanism of the jump scare, run at one-tenth speed and with the cheap payoff removed. The jump scare, a defence and a prosecution is the argument about whether the device has any dignity; Memoria is the strongest available evidence that it does, provided you are willing to strip out the cut, the sting and the cat. For the wider technical seam, the sound design revolution in modern horror covers how the rest of the genre got here.

The other technique is Swinton’s face. Apichatpong holds on her, in wide and in medium, for durations that would give a studio editor a stroke, and she gives him something very specific: the expression of a person listening to something that has just stopped. She has done stranger work elsewhere, and she has rarely done anything more precisely calibrated.

The distribution stunt, and whether it was one

Memoria was released in the United States by Neon as a perpetual roadshow: one cinema at a time, one town at a time, moving on, indefinitely, with no streaming release and no disc. The director backed it publicly. The reaction split neatly between people who called it the last honest defence of theatrical exhibition and people who called it an art-world stunt that guaranteed almost nobody would see the film.

Both readings have force. A picture whose entire method depends on a room with a subwoofer and no phones in it has an unusually strong claim to the argument, and this is a film that genuinely collapses on a laptop in a way that most “see it on the big screen” pieties do not. It is also true that a work nobody can access is a work that becomes a rumour, which is a specific kind of cultural capital. Set it against the 4K boutique label and the cult of physical media and you have the two opposite answers to the same anxiety about what happens to a film when the video shop dies.

Availability has loosened since. Territories outside the US have had ordinary releases, and it has appeared on physical media and arthouse platforms. If you can find it projected, take that option and take it seriously.

The real ancestor

The name Jessica Holland belongs to the sleepwalking woman in Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and Apichatpong knows it. That is the cross-reference to chase: a Val Lewton production in which a European arrives in a colonised landscape, encounters a system of belief the film declines to debunk, and is quietly absorbed. Lewton’s unit built dread out of sound and negative space because they had no money for monsters, and Memoria builds dread out of sound and negative space because it has no interest in monsters. The lineage is exact.

The other ancestor is Antonioni, and specifically Blow-Up (1966) and its audio sibling, Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) — a person interrogating a recording until the recording eats them. Where Apichatpong departs is that his protagonist is chasing a sound that was never recorded by anything except a nervous system.

The case against

The middle hour genuinely sags. Once the sound-studio scene has demonstrated what the film can do, there is a long stretch of hospital corridors, dinner parties and archaeology in which Memoria marks time and the noise stays away, and the honest word for a good deal of it is inert. The dinner-party scene in particular has an artificiality that Apichatpong’s Thai films never suffer from, and I suspect the reason is language: he is working through Spanish and English rather than in the register he has spent his life listening to.

The other charge is that the final movement resolves the mystery in a way that is either transcendent or ridiculous, and there is no third option. I will make the case below the line. Anyone who bounces off it is not making an error.

The verdict: the first hour contains the most sophisticated sequence about the difficulty of describing a feeling that cinema has produced, and the whole film is worth sitting through the sag for. It is Apichatpong at his most exportable and his least warm, and the tradeoff is real.

Where to find it, and what next

Look for a repertory screening first, then physical media, then a platform. Watch it with the volume genuinely high, at night, with nobody talking.

Then go back to the source: Uncle Boonmee for the warm version of this cosmology, Tropical Malady for the ferocious one, and Berberian Sound Studio for the other great film about a man in a booth trying to build a noise that means something.

Spoilers below

The engineer Hernán and Jessica get close. She goes to hear his band. She comes back to the studio and asks for him, and the staff tell her that no Hernán works there and no Hernán ever has. There is no dramatic reveal, no music, no dolly-in. The information simply arrives and the film moves on, and Jessica, remarkably, accepts it.

She goes to the countryside, where she meets the second Hernán, an older man scaling fish by a stream. He tells her he has never left the village and never watches television, because he remembers everything and additional memories would be unbearable. She touches his hand and hears, in a rush, everything he has ever heard. He lies down and stops — completely still, apparently dead, and then some minutes later he simply resumes, and calls it sleep, and Apichatpong films the whole thing in one unbroken shot of a man on the grass while the world keeps going.

Then the two of them sit together and he tells her he is an antenna, and she says she is a hard disk. He receives; she stores. The mountain the tunnel is being driven through is full of bones. Agnès’s dig has been pulling human remains, thousands of years old, out of the rock all film.

The sound is the mountain’s. Or the sound is the memory of everyone who died in that ground, arriving in the only person in Colombia built to store it. Jessica is a foreigner who has been hearing the country’s buried history as a physical impact for two hours and calling it a medical problem.

And then a spacecraft leaves. A grey ovoid object rises out of the hillside above the two of them, and departs, and the film cuts to the tunnel workers and the birds and ends.

The last five minutes are the reason people either carry this film for life or throw it across the room. I have some sympathy with the throwers. What persuades me is that the bang and the ship are the same object seen from two ends: a thing that was buried, that pressed against a woman’s skull for two hours, that finally becomes visible and leaves. The film’s argument is that a place remembers, that the remembering has mass, and that if you are quiet enough and stay long enough, the mass will find you and use you as a receiver. Everything in the sound mix has been arguing that from the first frame. The ship is just the moment Apichatpong finally lets you see the thing you have been listening to.