Mark Reviews Movies: MEMORIA (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 25, 2021

"There are plenty of stories already," says an older man, the key to the mystery presented by writer/director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in the final stretch of Memoria. There isn't much of a story here, which is partly the point of Weerasethakul's movie. The stories already have happened, and save for a few, nobody seems to care what they were, who was involved, and what they could have taught us.

One of the few, perhaps, is the main character, a British woman living in or working in or just visiting Colombia for reasons that make about as much sense as everything else here. Jessica (Tilda Swinton) studies and grows orchids, and her current plan, while staying in Bogotá, is to open a farm near Medellín. It's fine to forget or not care about any of these details, because even Jessica seems to forget and stop caring about her work, her plans, and everything else about her life as her search for the story's central mystery unfolds.

That mystery revolves around a loud boom. Weerasethakul opens the movie with one of its many static shots—just a view of a window at night, with the hints of bedsheets in the lowest part of the frame. There's a near silence, and yes, that qualifier is important, because much of the filmmaker's process in this experimental piece has to do with sound.

There's a low, almost imperceptible hum on the soundtrack in that relative hush—maybe an air conditioner or the faint buzz of electricity coursing through the walls, the fixtures, and the appliances. A much later moment gives us complete silence, and we realize just how much of everyday life, even in its quietest moments, is filled with constant noise.

One could argue that Weerasethakul is training us to notice the buzz, the hum, and the common sounds of nature and civilization just for that moment of sound's absolute absence. Indeed, an extended sequence has Jessica talking with a sound engineer named Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego). The two dissect a library of sound effects to find one that matches the boom that awakes Jessica at the start of the movie, occasionally appears again, and haunts her every waking moment—which is all the time now.

The fact that Jessica finds a similar sound in that archive—one that, with a little tinkering by Hernán, pretty much matches the dense thud with a slight echo—makes us wonder a few things. Is the sound part of the world within this movie, or is it simply Weerasethakul playing a game on his own character? He's definitely playing a sort of game with us by calling attention to the sound design within his own movie. We'd better listen to what's there, what Jessica hears, and what other people either can't or won't perceive.

A couple of scenes, for example, involve a series of car alarms. One is a slow camera move into a parking lot, as one car's alarm sounds, causing every other car to start honking and screeching in succession. Another has Jessica staring out the window of a hospital room, where her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke) is recuperating from an unspecified condition, and more cars are sounding more alarms.

In both cases, nobody gives the cacophony a single thought. Jessica notices the second noisy symphony, in the same way that a random man reacts with terror to the sound of a bus engine backfiring. Like so much of this world, hearing is subjective. A backfire is just a backfire, although it could be a gunshot to someone fearing or suspecting one. Jessica's boom is something, either only to her or to everyone, although only she notices or cares.

In other words, does the sound exist in Jessica's mind or in reality? A scene at a restaurant, in which she finally hears the boom while surrounded by actual people, doesn't help. Maybe, it's just a hallucination. Perhaps, it's real, but only Jessica, attuned to some different frequency or aware of Weerasethakul's influence on this fictional world or on account of some other explanation, can sense it.

The mystery of all of this, along with Weerasethakul's ability to hypnotize us by crafting a puzzle around so many different but completely ordinary soundscapes, is far more intriguing than almost any explanation the filmmaker could provide. We get one, more or less, by way of that older man (played by Elkin Díaz), whose name and, perhaps, identity are shared with someone else in Jessica's journey.

He appears in the jungle, where Jessica has traveled for reasons as fruitless to determine as so much else here. The man has a perfect memory, not only for what he has experienced, but also for what other people have experienced throughout history. He can also make himself essentially die, as he does in a rather comical bit of Weerasethakul delaying a vital conversation for more minutes of reflection.

The answer is a surprise, and the full explanation for it is probably buried in the man's cryptic words, as well as some hazy, static-filled dialogue that's transferred between Jessica and her final companion (Is the presence of a sound engineer also a hint at how someone could really unlock those secrets?). Memoria doesn't need an answer, but in giving us the suggestion of one anyway, Weerasethakul makes us forget what the question was in the first place.

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