"Memoria" begins with a bump in the night, or very early in the morning. We are in a darkened room, with just enough light peeking in to reveal the figure of a woman as she's jolted awake by a loud noise — "a rumble from the core of the Earth," as she'll later describe it. She sits up in bed, listening intently and scanning the shadows for the source of this disturbance. Is it a construction crew getting off to an early start? (It is not.) What exactly is this sound and why does it haunt her so, apart from her growing realization that she may be the only one who can hear it?
That last question propels this latest wonderment from the Thai writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose beautiful and entrancing films (including "Syndromes and a Century" and "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives") have earned him a devoted international following. If you know Weerasethakul's work, some of what you see in "Memoria," which won a jury prize at Cannes last year, may not surprise you: clinical rooms and lush landscapes; lengthy single-take sequences that observe more than they explain; a sense of enchantment that creeps almost imperceptibly into every becalmed frame. But if "Memoria" is a gorgeous reassertion of form, it is also a bold excursion into new territory.
Shot in Colombia (which it represented in the recent Oscar race for international feature), it's the director's first feature produced entirely outside Thailand. It also marks his first time working with a Hollywood star, and it says something about Weerasethakul's methods that Tilda Swinton, often typecast as a movie's most outlandish element, here provides an anchoring note of calm. The story begins in Bogota, where Jessica (Swinton), a Scottish-born orchidologist who lives in nearby Medellin, has come to visit her ailing sister. As those sounds disturb her waking moments and keep sleep at bay, she begins researching their origins — a mission that becomes ever more hypnotic and unsettling as it leads her out into the surrounding forest.
