‘Memoria’ (2021) Review

Interestingly then, Apichatpong’s new film, Memoria, is intimately focused on the interlinking stories, experiences, and memories of life on this strange planet–in a narrative that makes our seemingly familiar world feel instead like a planet far, far

PG - Drama, Sci-Fi (136 minutes)

dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Starring: Tilda Swinton

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Michael Pollan writes in How to Change Your Mind about the usefulness of psychedelic experiences in studies where psilocybin “…could be used to safely and reliably ‘occasion’ a mystical experience—typically described as the dissolution of one’s ego followed by a sense of merging with nature or the universe,” or others where it was used to treat “…anxiety and depression in cancer patients, addiction to nicotine and alcohol, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and eating disorders.” The key in each is the shifting self-narrative: you have a story you tell yourself and you know your role in that story. But what if the rules change? What if it melts away for a moment? Who do you become? What does your story look like now that its foundation seems wobblier? Did you know yourself or the world around you as well as you thought? 

This all seems—and frankly is—very hippie-esque, but Pollan suggests that it’s not unique to Cheech and Chong: “There is not a culture on earth . . . that doesn’t make use of certain plants to change the contents of the mind, whether as a matter of healing, habit, or spiritual practice . . . For our species, I learned, plants and fungi with the power to radically alter consciousness have long and widely been used as tools for healing the mind, for facilitating rites of passage, and for serving as a medium for communicating with supernatural realms, or spirit worlds. These uses were ancient and venerable in a great many cultures, but I ventured one other application: to enrich the collective imagination—the culture—with the novel ideas and visions that a select few people bring back from wherever it is they go.” The hero dies, enters the underworld, and returns with new wisdom. It’s the story we all keep telling—one of the few we know how to tell.

Not only do we keep telling the same stories, we demand them in recognizable permutations. Increasingly, popular culture seems to value even digressions from familiar stories over anything that looks unusual or unfamiliar, which, I assume, is how we got to the point where Twitter is fantasizing about Obi-wan Kenobi visiting Padme Skywalker’s grave in the upcoming Disney+ series. George Lucas has talked at length about how he utilized the beats of common myths from cultures around the world in what Joseph Campbell called the monomyth. If there’s one thing George Lucas always understood, it’s that familiarity is your friend in the entertainment industry. In the far other end of the galaxy of media culture you have filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, director of surreal, deliberately paced art films like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives or Cemetery of Splendour. Apichatpong’s films are difficult, slow, and surreal–though unlike more commercially popular surrealists like David Lynch, his elements of mysticism and the supernatural don’t overwhelm the gentle and sometimes mundane filmmaking approach. It’s a film language all his own that can be off-putting for some and invigorating for others who scan the frame for meaning in long shots without much action being presented. In other words, for a global culture obsessed with regurgitations of the monomyth in increasingly identical templates, at first glance Apichatpong’s storytelling sensibilities may as well come from another planet entirely. 

Interestingly then, Apichatpong’s new film, Memoria, is intimately focused on the interlinking stories, experiences, and memories of life on this strange planet–in a narrative that makes our seemingly familiar world feel instead like a planet far, far away. It follows Jessica, played by the always spectacular Tilda Swinton, who is in Colombia doing some kind of vague work with flowers and becomes increasingly fascinated by excavation projects deeper and deeper into the rainforest. This brings her to the remains of ancient humans, their cultures, and their connection to the flora that is still living if one finds the fortitude to escape the city. Her work is complicated by a strange sound that only she seems to be able to hear: a loud, earthy boom. It has no obvious source or trigger and Jessica is both haunted by it and increasingly addicted to its effect on her, where she is visibly shaken out of any social rhythm or train of thought. She can’t sleepwalk through life, if indeed that is how she used to live, because there is a constant threat of the next boom. She has to be present, which in some ways is a foreign and bizarre way of living in today’s world. This is compounded by conversations about curses, an ancient ritual of carving into a skull to let out demons, a possibly hallucinated sound engineer who helps her recreate the noise, and a finale where nature, history, and consciousness seem to converge into something entirely unknowable. 

This is Apichatpong’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—in more ways than you’d expect—but instead of the past as a prelude to a transcendent future, Memoria is the story of transcending the present to access the past—the planet’s memory and trauma and promise—which is presumably imprinted in us all if only we can turn off the noise of our lives and listen. Jeff Vandermeer, in describing his impetus to write the excellent Southern Reach Trilogy, noted that he felt the way to get readers invested in the natural world was to create a context where it becomes alien—foreign and ungoverned by the rules we suppose everything adheres to. He explained after the final novel in the trilogy, Acceptance, was released, that part of what was on his mind was that “…our environment contains much that’s invisible to our senses that permeates the landscape — that actually permeates us as well. Microbial life, parasites, creatures in symbiosis, things that live in the air. Plants, too, are communicating one to another and insects through pheromones. There are latticeworks and cathedrals of conversation that we’re unable to ‘hear.’ We have fairly primitive sensory data coming in on all of this, and this means we misunderstand our environment from the moment we’re born. If we sometimes feel a prickle on the edge of our senses it may be that some part of our reptile brain is experiencing a ghost of an echo of the complexity that truly surrounds us.” Fittingly for a filmmaker as dense and abstruse as Apichatpong, the best way to understand Memoria may come from an author unrelated to it, not talking about it. 

Jessica hears a ghost of an echo of the complexity that truly surrounds us and the film’s 130 minute runtime finds her inching closer and closer to seeing that complexity in the dissolution of her ego and merging with the universe. Apichatpong takes us there with her, perhaps hoping the journey might function like the therapeutic psychedelic experiences Michael Pollan writes about: enriching our cultural imaginations with visions of wherever it is the film takes us in its final stretch. And this experience—this psychedelic film—will not be released to streaming or physical media, opting instead for a never-ending theatrical tour from city to city. I take this to mean that I likely will never have the opportunity to see it again. And perhaps the perfect, if commercially baffling, place for a film that invites us to set aside our contemporary narratives, to enter the underworld of the primal history of life on earth and emerge wiser for it, is to be left just out of reach in our memories. 

Memoria’s never-ending theatrical tour dates can be found here.