Synopsis
One morning, Jessica Holland, a Scottish orchid farmer visiting her sister in Bogotá, is woken by a loud ‘bang’. This haunting sound dispels her sleep for days, calling into question her identity and guiding her from recording studios to secluded jungle villages in an attempt to find its source.
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Cast
- Tilda SwintonJessica Holland
- Agnes BrekkeKaren Holland
- Daniel Giménez CachoJuan Ospina
- Jerónimo BarónMateo Ospina
- Juan Pablo UrregoYoung Hernán Bedoya
- Jeanne BalibarAgnes Cerkinsky
- Aída MoralesVendor
- Constanza GuitérrezDoctor Constanza
- Elkin DíazOlder Hernán Bedoya
- Daniel ToroAnthropologist Assistant (uncredited)
Recommendations
- 100
Slant Magazine
Again in a Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, we find spirits lurking behind the everyday world, but in Memoria, they might just be repressed memories emanating from a world that never actually forgets. - 100
The Guardian
In a calmly realist, non-mystic movie language, this director really can convince you that the living and the dead, the past and the present, the terrestrial and the other, do exist side by side. - 100
The Film Stage
To be as suggestive, yet covert as possible, the great innovation of this film is the notion of how sounds can be memories—all too often in the popular imagination, we think of them as mini-movies of the mind, or visual spots of time as in The Tree of Life or the Romantic poet Wordsworth’s concept. - 91
IndieWire
Memoria is more meditation than movie, a transfixing deep-dive into the profound challenges of relating to people and places from the outside in. - 91
The Playlist
A master of slow cinema, Weerasethakul takes his time with every shot; long stretches of time pass without any dialogue or movement. In so doing, the film inculcates a kind of hypersensitivity in its viewers, who become suddenly attuned to each flitting blade of grass or buzzing fly that enters the shot—as well as to their own posture and breathing. - 90
Screen Daily
Graced by Tilda Swinton’s emptied-out performance as a woman haunted by a strange sound whose origins she is obsessed with uncovering, Memoria eludes easy categorisation while becoming a powerful meditation on connection, spiritual isolation and renewal. - 90
TheWrap
It is cinema that, if you let it, can check our heartbeats, frustrate our minds and connect with our very souls. - 80
The Hollywood Reporter
The beautiful closing landscape shots of the jungles and mountains suggest that memory extends even beyond the human dimension.
