Rent Memoria (2021)

Extraordinary, meditative piece - Memoria review by PD

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's extraordinary film concerns a banging noise heard by a Scottish orchidologist (the wonderful Tilda Swinton) in the depths of Colombia, and much of the film concerns the ramifications of this apparent mental affliction. I read somewhere that the disturbing sound — which echoes over and over again during the course of the film — was inspired by something that Weerasethakul himself experienced, thereby recalling the tinnitus and other tropical maladies that Pedro Almodóvar revealed in “Pain & Glory.” But here the director turns these loud, impossible-to-anticipate aural bursts into tiny attacks, thus interrupting an otherwise largely Zen-like piece - one wonderful scene involving Jessica in a restaurant with her sister and sister's husband is particularly well-done.

Weerasethakul’s films coax images out of the darker corners of the subconscious, but do so very subtly indeed, leaving audiences to mull over their mysteries to the sounds of insects and rustling leaves. Rather than limiting himself to what can be explained by science or logic, the director embraces the so-called supernatural: spells and spirits, invisible threats and animals that seem to possess a kind of menacing power only partway understood by humans (like the dog Jessica observes wandering a public square in an especially eerie sequence). During the deliberately unhurried film's first hour and a half or so, Jessica could be a kind of 21st-century Mr. Hulot, saying little as she ambles about a surreal modern Medellín. Whilst investigating orchid-threatening fungi in the university library, Jessica meets a professor who invites her in to examine a 6,000-year-old human skeleton; at the academic’s prompting, she hesitantly stretches out a finger and probes the hole bored in the ancient skull. To citizens of the future, “modern medicine” may well seem as primitive.

There's a faintly comic section as Jessica consults a doctor, but her instincts lead her to visit one of her husband’s former students, Hernan, who works in a recording studio. It’s a sign of the film’s unhurried sense of time that, during the course of a wonderful protracted scene, Jessica tries to describe the banging as Hernan pulls samples from a library of sound effects to help re-create what she’s been hearing. Hernan then takes it upon himself to compose a piece of music that incorporates the noise, but Weerasethakul cleverly withholds the melody from us, making it one of many things that may only exist in Jessica’s head. But even the young man’s existence might be in question, as Hernan is nowhere to be found when she returns to the studio some days later. Jessica then decides to hit the road, leaving the city with its aural soup of blaring car alarms and police sirens for the untamed Amazon. The noises follow her, and so does Hernan - or maybe he’s been out there waiting for her all along, for Jessica meets a friendly local fish scaler with the same name. This last section is even slower and entirely plotless, but undoubtedly the most compelling, with the couple's connection explored very delicately, as Hernan No. 2 claims to remember everything: “That’s why I never watch movies or television,” he says. It could be that Jessica here serves as the director’s stand-in: a filmmaker questioning the power and limitations of his own medium - cinema can document things for posterity, but there’s so much it cannot capture — and when Weerasethakul finally reveals the source of the noise, the explanation is even harder to believe.

The sounds Jessica hears are for me a wake-up call of sorts, forcing her to engage with those dimensions of the world humans are ill-equipped to explain: what lives on when someone dies, and the way places serve as a kind of fossil imprint of everything they’ve witnessed - the closing shots suggesting memory extending beyond humanity. Amazing work.

tested my patience to destruction - Memoria review by AS

I generally enjoy "art-house" films as much as Hollywood blockbusters, but Memoria took me beyond my tether. The very opening shot was held so long without movement that I had to check that the Bluray player hadn't frozen. It hadn't! This opening frame set the pace for the whole movie, the camera was deliberately set into a medium wide-shot then held interminably. ( The Jury Prize award given to this film has me baffled, I must be missing something.) There was mystery but I couldn't care enough about the characters as they were barely written. The "revelation" towards the end looked absurd in the context. Avoid unless you suffer from insomnia.

Oh dear - Memoria review by si

Very boring painfully slow moving film .nothing really happens. Over 2 hours of a pointless movie as entertaining as watching paint dry!

Paint drying! - Memoria review by PP

I was truly disppointed withthis film; I think Tilda Swinton is a superb actree BUT this film was a waste of her talent!

so slow - Memoria review by WW

it was very slow to start and never actually did start, my eyes picked up on one clip but that faided into the distance, slowest dullest film ever

Exploring the boundaries of awareness - Memoria review by KS

Have you ever been quite certain of the reality of something others seem unable to perceive? Jessica gathers the quiet courage needed to explore the boundaries of mystery, which is, of course, where all the really interesting stuff happens in life.

This film invites the viewer; you can't stay outside it to be entertained, you have to slow yourself, look longer and become involved in uncertainty.

Way too slow - Memoria review by LC

Like most of the other reviewers here, I found this film way too slow to be enjoyable on any level. I only managed around 45 minutes, but in that, virtually nothing happens, no clarity is given to who the characters are and what they are doing, dialog is almost non-existent and there is nothing to engage the viewer at all. I'm all for slow-burn films, but this just tried my patience too far.