Review: 'Memoria' is a hypnotic meditation on sound and nostalgia, a fertile field for actress Tilda Swinton's eerie magic

With the filmed-in-Colombia tale “Memoria,” the Palme D’Or-winning Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul proves that his meditative, hypnotic style of filmmaking can cross oceans and retain its alluring power.

The only unsurprising thing in this movie is that Weerasethakul convinced the chameleonic actress Tilda Swinton — who has worked with a constellation of great directors, including Derek Jarman, Sally Potter, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers, Lynne Ramsay, Luca Guadagnino, Joanna Hogg, Bong Joon-Ho, Bela Tarr, Judd Apatow, Wes Anderson and Pedro Almodóvar — to star in his first English-language movie. 

Swinton plays Jessica, a Scottish archaeologist living in Medellin, Colombia, where an excavation crew building a tunnel recently unearthed human bones that may be millennia old. But something else is distracting Jessica from her work. Early one morning, she hears a loud sound, a “thwack” that she cannot identify or pinpoint.

Early in the film, Jessica goes to meet a sound engineer named Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), to ask him to create an approximate version of the sound. Later in the film, in a bit of film symmetry, she goes to the jungle and meets another man named Hernán (Elkin Diaz), who knows the sound from his dreams.

In long, static, evocative takes, Weerasethakul (who won the Palme D’Or for his 2010 memory play “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”) captures the locations of Colombia — from the city to the jungle — and Jessica’s small but important place in their midst. Swinton, with her infinite curiosity, gently pokes and prods the contours of this setting and these situations, slowly discovering how much wider this world is than we realize.

“Memoria” should be experienced, if one is comfortable doing so, in a theater with a rich sound system. The journey Weerasethakul takes us on is sonic as well as cinematic, and that takes some extra space.

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‘Memoria’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for some thematic elements and brief language. for Running time: 136 minutes; in English and Spanish with subtitles.