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Memoria review – Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tilda Swinton make a dream team

The Thai master’s English-language debut – about an expat attuned to strange frequencies in Colombia – more than matches his past mystic odysseys

T he Thai artist and film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul offers us his own kind of exaltation and his own abolition of gravity; he fixes you with his unbroken gaze and his meaning seems to float out of the screen – and you float out of your cinema seat to meet it. 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. Memoria is a beautiful and mysterious movie, slow cinema that decelerates your heartbeat.

For some, the andante tempo, with its glacially long silent takes, will exasperate – and opinions may divide on the extraordinary sci-fi epiphany ending. Even now I’m not sure what I think about it. But what originality and daring, the biggest ideas invoked with compelling zen humility. Weerasekathul is an artist who demands that you return your thoughts to the unsolved and unspoken mysteries of existence: that we are born, live, die and all without ever knowing why, or often even wanting to know. But he approaches these phenomena as calmly as he might questions of agriculture or engineering.

This is the first movie that Weerasethakul has made outside Thailand and with a non-Thai cast. The setting is Colombia, and Tilda Swinton plays Jessica, an expatriate Englishwoman who lives in Medellín running a market-gardening business selling flowers; she is in Bogotá visiting her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke) and her husband, Juan (Daniel Giménez Cacho, from Lucrecia Martel’s Zama), because Karen is ill in hospital with a mysterious respiratory complaint. One night, Jessica is awoken from a sleep by a strange bang or sonic boom. What is going on? There is no building work nearby. And apparently only Jessica can hear this sound.

She goes out for dinner at a restaurant with Karen and Juan, and she hears the sound again, as clear as gunshots, but realises that no one else is aware of them, so she just has to keep talking. It is one of the most disturbing scenes I have seen recently at the movies. The sounds appear to be presentiments or symptoms of some profound shift in the world, and she has been singled out as the only person aware of them – a strange annunciation. Can this perhaps have something to do with the ancient bones that have been dug up in the city? Or is that Jessica is entering some metempsychotic breakdown?

She visits the student of a friend in a recording studio: Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) and asks him if he can recreate the noise digitally, which he does and then plays her the music that he is working on. They seem to be on the verge of some kind of romantic relationship, when she arrives at the studio to be told by baffled engineers that no such person of that name has ever worked there. But later she is to encounter an older man, also called Hernán (Elkin Diaz) who may be his doppelganger spirit and who, like Funes the Memorious in the Borges story, says he has never left his village because he remembers everything that has ever happened to him and cannot risk being overwhelmed. As she talks to this older Hernán, recovered memories arise into her consciousness, as if tuning into a long-lost radio frequency. But are they her memories?

Memoria is an out-of-body experience that you have to build up to, step by step. All admirers of this director, with his enigmatic realist-mystic masterpieces such as Tropical Malady and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives will know broadly what to expect. But he is still capable of astonishing you, all over again. I’m not being facetious when I say that watching this film reminded me of when I was 17, hearing Revolution 9 on The White Album for the first time. It left a residue of happiness in my heart.

• Tilda Swinton
• World cinema
• Cannes film festival
• Cannes 2021
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Review: ‘Memoria’ is one of the greatest movies you’ll see — or hear — in a theater this year

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“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.

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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 Bogotá, where Jessica (Swinton), a Scottish-born orchidologist who lives in nearby Medellín, 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.

With its subtly bifurcated, town-to-country structure, “Memoria” carries echoes of some of its predecessors, especially “Blissfully Yours” and “Tropical Malady.” But the differences are as striking as the similarities. Nearly every Weerasethakul movie can be approached as a kind of mystery, but “Memoria” is his first to present itself so explicitly as a detective story. And while sound has always been a crucial element of his formal design — his films are veritable symphonies of rushing water, chattering wildlife and soaring Thai pop — he has never been more attentive to the contours of his soundscape, or more insistent that we not only look but listen. (His key collaborators here include the sound designer Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, the sound supervisor Javier Umpiérrez and the sound director Raúl Locatelli.)

In one of the movie’s most enveloping scenes — a demonstration of how easily, in Weerasethakul’s hands, the mundane can slip into the magical — Jessica seeks assistance from a young sound engineer, Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego). In exacting detail, she describes the loud bang she’s been hearing (“a big ball of concrete that falls into a metal well which is surrounded by seawater”), which Hernán tries to replicate using a library of movie sound effects. A digital reproduction played on a computer, he warns her, might approximate what she’s hearing, but won’t achieve the same impact — a statement that reverberates here in ways that may exceed even Weerasethakul’s own intentions.

Here it may be worth noting that “Memoria” is the beneficiary of an appropriately experimental release strategy devised by its distributor, Neon. (It opens this Friday for a weeklong run at the Nuart and will play at other Los Angeles theaters in coming weeks.) The idea is for the movie to play exclusively and eternally on the big screen, one theater and one city at a time; it will never be made available on DVD or home-streaming platforms. When this plan was announced months ago, some dismissed it as elitist — hardly the first time that word has been hurled in Weerasethakul’s direction. Others , myself included, couldn’t help but applaud Neon for treating “Memoria” as not just another chunk of streamable content, but rather as a work of art that demands to be approached on its own terms and experienced under the best possible conditions.

To put it another way: Weerasethakul doesn’t make convenient movies, and our culture of instant cinematic gratification could scarcely be more antithetical to the way he perceives the world. And so there is something to be said for allowing his movie to reach its audience at a pace commensurate with its own serene, meditative rhythms. When you go to see “Memoria” — and I urge you to make time to see it — you may feel an instinctive kinship with Jessica from that jolt of an opener: Here you are, just like her, having left home to find yourself sitting in darkness, watching and listening and trying to figure out what the hell’s going on. There’s pleasure in this discombobulation, and within a few moments, you find yourself warming to Jessica’s company — and marveling at Swinton’s ability to both harness and downplay her natural magnetism.

This is not the first time she has modulated her screen presence in service to an auteur’s otherworldly vision, or proven herself an exceptionally skilled polyglot. (Having tried her hand at Hungarian in “The Man From London” and Russian-accented Italian in “I Am Love,” Swinton speaks Spanish here with a longtime expat’s slightly faltering fluency.) It’s a wondrously self-effacing performance from an actor who ordinarily can’t help but grab the camera’s attention. Here, the cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (shooting on 35-millimeter film) maintains a watchful distance from Swinton, seldom going in for a close-up (the rare exception is a jaw-dropper) and finding the expressive depths in her spare, precise body language.

Warm yet reserved, happy to speak but happier to listen, Jessica awakens your protective instincts and your identification. But if she serves as something of a surrogate for the audience, she might also be a stand-in for Weerasethakul: a curious, sensitive outsider, humbly engaging with the riddles of a culture that isn’t her own. We watch as she walks the streets of Bogotá, wanders an art gallery and shops for a refrigerator for her orchids. She sits with her recovering sister (Agnes Brekke) in a hospital and consults an archaeologist (Jeanne Balibar) who’s studying ancient human remains. In time Jessica will head out into the countryside, not far from where those remains were excavated, and make contact with an older fisherman (a remarkable Elkin Díaz). There, in a rapturously beautiful riverside idyll, they forge a connection as inexplicable as it is profound.

The fisherman happens to be named Hernán, and the possibility that he and the sound engineer are the same person — or alternate versions thereof — would hardly be out of place in Weerasethakul’s cinematic universe, where the transmigration of souls is a given. In her own way, too, Jessica is granted access to someone else’s consciousness. As the older Hernán shares a draft of his hallucination-stirring home brew and speaks about his own personal history, Jessica seems to empty herself out. She becomes a vessel — “an antenna,” in her host’s words — for the perceptions, insights and recollections of others. Hernán describes himself as a “hard disk,” a bottomless repository of memories, and the references to outmoded technology further immerse us in a world that feels both far from home and out of time.

“Memoria,” as its title makes transparent, is about the excavation and reanimation of lost memories, the preservation of things in danger of being lost, destroyed or forgotten. These might include the traditions of Colombia’s Indigenous people, or perhaps the lives affected by the armed conflict that has regularly engulfed the nation since the 1960s. But Weerasethakul has no use for conventional history lessons. He loves the people in front of his camera, and his love proves contagious. He’s also fascinated by the forces of decay and impermanence, and the possibility of using technology to cheat them or at least slow them down. Jessica’s refrigerators are one such mechanism; the cinema is another.

And cinema, as Weerasethakul reminds us, is still a young art, one whose properties and possibilities are still in the process of revealing themselves. An explanation for those strange sounds does materialize, and even coming from a filmmaker who has primed us to expect the otherworldly, it’s something to see — and to hear. A paean to the distant past that unfolds in a rigorous present tense, “Memoria” finally reveals itself as a vision from the future — a declaration of faith in a medium that hasn’t lost its power to astonish.

In Spanish and English with English subtitles Not rated Running time: 2 hours, 16 minutes Playing: Starts April 8, Landmark Nuart, West Los Angeles; April 29, American Cinematheque at Los Feliz 3; May 13, Laemmle Playhouse 7, Pasadena; June 3, Laemmle Noho 7, North Hollywood; June 24, Laemmle Glendale

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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‘Memoria’ Review: In Search of Lost Time

Tilda Swinton stars in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s elusive and enchanting new film, set in Colombia.

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By A.O. Scott

In the middle of the night, Jessica hears a noise — loud and slightly metallic, somewhere between a bang and thud. Later, talking with a young sound engineer named Hernán, she will describe it as large ball of concrete slamming into a metal wall surrounded by seawater, a remarkably vivid image that Hernán patiently attempts to synthesize.

Jessica, a British expatriate living in Colombia and played by Tilda Swinton, refers to what she heard as “my sound” — “mi sonido” in Spanish — and it seems to exist for her ears alone. Or rather for her and the audience watching “Memoria,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s enigmatic and enchanting new film.

The sound startles Jessica at dinner with her sister (Agnes Brekke) and brother-in-law (Daniel Giménez Cacho), and follows her from Bogotá to a small town in the mountains. The possibility that it’s an auditory hallucination is raised at one point, and there are other moments when the reliability of Jessica’s perception seems to be in question. Is Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) a figment of her imagination? If so, how could he have offered to buy her a refrigerator for the orchids she is raising on her farm in Medellín?

Even though Jessica visits a rural doctor, asking for Xanax to help her sleep — the doctor offers Jesus as a safer, more effective treatment — her psychological state isn’t really what “Memoria” is about. Saying exactly what it is about poses a quandary that multiple viewings are unlikely to dispel. Every scene unfolds with quiet, meticulous clarity, but Weerasethakul’s luminous precision only deepens the mystery.

Whenever you think you have a handle on where the story might be going, the ground shifts. Jessica is baffled by the sound and other, vaguely similar phenomena, but she doesn’t seem to be delusional, or even unduly troubled. She is curious, gently questioning people she meets — notably an anthropologist (Jeanne Balibar) and a second, older Hernán (Elkin Díaz) — about their work and its potential relevance to her situation. The film operates in a similar spirit, following an invisible map toward a surprising destination.

Along the way, Weerasethakul pauses to contemplate the remnants of ancient civilizations and the chaos of a modern life, as flickerings of supernaturalism, disrupted chronology, science fiction and the literary speculations of Jorge Luis Borges illuminate Jessica’s journey.

The director, most of whose previous films take place in Thailand, has a longstanding interest in the visual, social and metaphysical contrasts between city and countryside. His urban spaces, like the university where the first Hernán works and the hospital where Jessica’s sister is a patient, tend to be sleek and institutional, governed less by commerce or political authority than by science and technology. The Southeast Asian jungles in his “Tropical Malady” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” — and the lush Andean mountainside where the second Hernán makes his home — are zones of magic, where the modern distinction between myth and fact does not apply.

This doesn’t quite make Weerasethakul a magical realist, though the South American setting of “Memoria” might make that description especially tempting. His imagination is philosophical and speculative, and in style he is more a poet than a fabulist, at home in the gaps between our various ways of making sense of the world.

His refusal to explain can be a challenge, and “Memoria” demands patience and attention. I found it an emotionally wrenching and intellectually fulfilling experience, but not one I can easily summarize or classify, partly because the feeling of radical uncertainty — Jessica’s feeling, but also mine — was a little too real. Her gradual unmooring from any stable sense of reality, and her perseverance in spite of that dislocation, strike me as utterly familiar, even as the causes of her alienation remains elusive. I am haunted by the plight of the second Hernán, a man blessed and cursed with a prodigious memory that connects him to a universe of suffering even as it condemns him to a state of isolation.

Swinton and Díaz are subtle, charismatic performers, and their scenes together, which make up most of the film’s last section, bring it to a new level of intensity. What passes between Jessica and Hernán, and the sequence of images that follows, represent a quietly mind-blowing moment of cinema, something as wild and argument-provoking now as the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey” was in 1968.

You have to see it to believe it, and to see it you’ll have to go to a movie theater. “Memoria” is opening in New York this week and then making its way across the country, one cinema at a time. It’s worth the wait, and the trip.

Memoria Rated PG. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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‘Memoria’ is a haunting, transcendent, unforgettable film

Tilda swinton plays a woman who sets out to discover the source of a mysterious sonic boom and finds a far deeper mystery instead.

In filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s eerily poetic, unforgettable “Memoria,” Tilda Swinton plays Jessica, a British botanist in Colombia who awakens one night to a mysterious, loud boom that, over the course of successive days — or maybe weeks, it is deliberately unclear — seems to haunt her, both figuratively and literally. She seeks out the services of Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), a young sound engineer, hoping Hernán’s expertise and digital effects library might help her re-create the pitch, echo and timbre of the tone, which she likens to a “big ball of concrete falling into a metal well, surrounded by seawater.” (Jessica’s first assumption was that the sound must have been due to construction next door.)

Jessica also consults a doctor (Constanza Gutierrez), complaining of lingering anxiety and insomnia, in the wake of the noise. Elsewhere — outside, after an encounter with a stray dog; in a restaurant, while dining with her sister (Agnes Brekke) and her brother-in-law (Daniel Giménez Cacho); finally, by a rural brook — Jessica hears the sound again, sometimes multiple times.

But beneath this straightforward (if enigmatic) premise, there is a gradual slippage, as if the plate tectonics of Weerasethakul’s seemingly solid medical/mental mystery were subtly rearranging themselves, like puzzle pieces shifted by an unseen hand. As they lose their narrative mooring, the various parts of the whole have the effect of rearranging your own consciousness, in a way that leaves your perceptions feeling profoundly altered, perhaps permanently. Is that not the measure of all great art? (“Memoria” won the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, shared with “Ahed’s Knee.”)

Jessica’s sister — who is hospitalized with an unspecified illness early in the film — wakes up in her bed talking of a curse. Jessica’s brother-in-law informs her that there is no construction anywhere near where Jessica is staying. The doctor Jessica goes to resists prescribing medication, handing her patient a religious pamphlet instead. And Hernán, who has been especially patient and solicitous with Jessica’s request, suddenly disappears. It isn’t that he has left — it’s as if Hernán never existed. Even those who seem to be his work colleagues inexplicably insist there is no one there by his name.

Is Jessica delusional? Is she experiencing auditory — and, in the case of Hernán, visual — hallucinations? The film meanders noncommittally, lyrically, refusing to say or care. But it is in the third act of “Memoria” that things get really weird, in a way that is both baffling and beautiful.

True to its title, “Memoria’s” theme is memory and its shifting seams and sandlike substrate, on which the footing of the film — and, by extension, our footing as well — is never terribly sure. Early in the film, there is a street scene in which a man falls to the pavement and then jumps up, running, while looking over his shoulder in seeming terror of pursuit. His fall and subsequent panic follow a bang — not Jessica’s, but perhaps a gunshot, this being Medellín — yet there is no immediate or obvious threat, only what seems to be the memory of one.

In the film’s glacially unhurried, almost transcendent climax, Jessica meets a second man (Elkin Díaz) who has the exact same name as her sound engineer friend but is much older. Over the course of a strange, long encounter, Hernán No. 2 tells her many bizarre things, including that he never dreams but remembers everything. “I’m like a hard disk,” he says, lying down to nap at one point and — well, I’ll let you discover what happens next yourself.

A strange connection is gradually established between Jessica and Hernán, one that hints at both reincarnation — a theme of Weerasethakul’s “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives” — and telepathy. “You are an antenna,” Hernán tells Jessica.

As “Memoria” came to its open-ended conclusion — more like a beginning than an end — I walked out feeling like a bit of an antenna myself, like maybe we all are receivers of a sort. In my case, the feeling was as if the station that had been playing inside my head all my life had just been tuned to another channel, and I wasn’t sure if I could, or even wanted to, get the old one back again.

PG. At the AFI Silver Theatre. Contains some mature thematic elements and brief strong language. In English and Spanish with subtitles. 136 minutes.

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Movie Reviews

'memoria' is a marvelously strange sonic detective story.

Justin Chang

Jessica (Tilda Swinton) consults an engineer (Juan Pablo Urrego) in an effort to understand the mysterious sound she's hearing in Memoria . Neon films hide caption

Jessica (Tilda Swinton) consults an engineer (Juan Pablo Urrego) in an effort to understand the mysterious sound she's hearing in Memoria .

I'm a huge fan of the Thai writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which doesn't do much to dispel the widely held assumption that he makes movies only a critic could love. Weerasethakul's films, like Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century , certainly demand close attention: They're slow-paced and contemplative, steeped in Thai folklore and Buddhist belief, and they have little interest in conventional narrative. They're also thrilling and deeply moving; if you go into them with your eyes and ears wide open and take the time to adjust to their rhythms, it's hard not to fall under their spell.

Weerasethakul's new movie is called Memoria , and while it's as marvelously strange as anything he's ever made, it's also a bit of a departure. It's his first feature shot entirely outside Thailand, and it also marks his first time working with a movie star, in this case, the great Tilda Swinton. She's quietly mesmerizing as a Scottish-born botanist named Jessica, who lives in Medellín, Colombia. She's recently come to the city of Bogotá to visit her sister, who's recovering from a mysterious illness. The movie begins when Jessica is awakened in the middle of the night by a loud bang.

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Tilda swinton may be a rock star, but her new film leaves her speechless.

In the days to come, Jessica will hear that bang again and again, and soon she realizes that she's the only one who can hear it. Memoria is a sonic detective story, and it follows Jessica around town as she tries to figure out what the sound is, and why she's hearing it. She visits a young sound engineer named Hernán, played by Juan Pablo Urrego, who tries to help re-create the noise using pre-recorded sound effects. Speaking in a mix of Spanish and English, Jessica describes the sound as "a big ball of concrete that falls into a metal well."

Jessica's investigation leads her in a lot of strange directions. She visits an archeologist who's studying some recently excavated human remains that may have something to do with the sound she's hearing. She spends some more time with Hernán, but then he suddenly vanishes, leaving her — and us — to wonder if she's losing her grip on reality.

Eventually Jessica travels to a nearby mountain village and meets an older fisherman, curiously also named Hernán, played by Elkin Díaz. Could they be two different versions of the same person? It wouldn't be a surprise in Weerasethakul's world, which is full of parallel realities and reincarnated spirits.

Hernán says he's both blessed and cursed by his ability to remember everything that has ever happened to him, which provides a clue as to the significance of Memoria 's title. It all builds to a climax that left my jaw on the floor, as we finally find out what's been causing that sound — though as always with Weerasethakul, the revelation yields more questions than answers.

But while Memoria has its share of baffling moments, Swinton's restrained presence anchors every scene. There's something especially emotional about the time Jessica spends with the older Hernán, in which we see two people who have never met forge an inexplicable yet profound connection. You can't take your eyes off Swinton, even when she's simply sitting still and quietly listening to someone speak. You're reminded, in these moments, that just listening to someone can be an act of radical empathy.

There were a lot of mixed reactions last year when the film distributor Neon announced that Memoria would only be shown on the big screen, as part of a never-ending road-tour-style release. As of now, there are no plans for the movie to be made available on DVD or streaming platforms. There's something refreshing about this approach, which treats Memoria not as just another chunk of disposable, streamable content, but as a work of art whose crystalline images and intricate sound design demand to be experienced under the best possible conditions. I hope you'll get to experience Memoria , as it's one of the most transporting movies you'll see — or hear — in a theater this year.

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Memoria’s sensory-overload mystery swirls around Tilda Swinton

Acclaimed director Apichatpong Weerasethakul returns with an eerie meditation

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This review of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria comes from the film’s screening at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. Stay tuned for more information when the film arrives in U.S. release.

After hearing a major thud, Jessica (Tilda Swinton) suddenly wakes up to a milk-colored nighttime. The sound is dull, yet sharp, and it doesn’t have a clear sense of origin. Jessica soon discovers that almost no one else can hear the repeating, threatening clonk, save for pigeons and one frightened passerby on the street. Memoria, a glacial 136-minute meditation by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul ( Tropical Malady , Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives ), concerns Jessica’s search for the truth behind this foreboding sound. And it’s a kind of ghost story, filled with supernatural terror and a psychological exploration of the connected human consciousness.

Jessica is an expatriate English woman living in Medellín, Colombia, where she operates a flower-selling business. She’s visiting her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke), who’s in a Bogata hospital suffering from a mysterious respiratory ailment. Initially, Memoria seems to concern Karen’s short-term memory issues: She doesn’t remember Jessica’s visits to the hospital. But she does remember an ominous stray dog, starving on the street, which she hoped to save, but ultimately forgot to help. Now she believes she’s cursed. But Memoria isn’t about individual memory, but collective forgetfulness.

Memoria operates on an eerie level: The sharp thuds arrive without notice, occasionally one at a time, other times in succession. Jessica eventually goes to a young, flirtatious recording engineer, Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), to replicate the sound. It’s deep, low, and metallic, as though it sprung from the center of the earth, like molten rock landing on the ground. Swinton’s angular frame becomes rigid whenever she hears the noises. Her physical tension is best expressed when Hernan is trying to recreate the noise’s sonic footprint: The closer he comes to replicating it, the more her shoulders become upright, as though the clatter were kissing her spine.

Weerasethakul’s film is a feast of a sonic landscape, and not just because of the thud. The rattle of the wind between the leaves seems to have its own language. A subplot in the narrative includes construction workers uncovering an ancient skeleton of a girl with a hole drilled into her skull to release demons. Likewise, Jessica is diagnosed with “Exploding Head Syndrome.” Weerasethakul isn’t too concerned with the mechanics of either phenomena. He takes greater interest in demonstrating how Colombia has moved away from its supernatural, indigenous roots to becoming a modern country, and the ways a white woman traversing that foreign ground can be consumed by the echoed ghosts of a lost culture.

Just as abnormal as the noise Jessica hears are the people she meets. She and Hernán form a connection, but he mysteriously disappears. Jessica later ventures to a hospital for treatment, and a nurse diagnoses her with hallucinations and suggests religion over Xanax. Finally, she meets another Hernán, this one an older fisherman who claims to remember everything, even memories from before he was born. They share communal memories of a mugging, and then the massacre of a family from decades ago. It’s one of the few times this movie speaks with clarity, to describe how generational and national trauma sticks to the back of one’s skull.

Swinton adjusts to these strange hurdles with aplomb. Though she has an immense range, she seems best positioned in films like Snowpiercer and We Need to Talk About Kevin , which leverage her unearthly presence. Memoria accomplishes the same thing, letting Swinton naturally relate to the bleak sci-fi undercurrents coursing through the film.

Weerasethakul’s Memoria is sometimes too opaque, however, and the deliberate pace by editor Lee Chatametikool becomes a muddled hindrance rather than offering clarity. To a certain extent, that’s the point. The shots are long and measured — it feels like there are only a few dozen cuts in the entire movie. That pace allows viewers to search the screen for meaning, just as Jessica is searching for the origin of the noise. That’s a gracious interpretation. The harsher view: This film is too metaphor-heavy to wholly hit its emotional target.

Instead, the film speaks with a primordial timbre. A sensation that’s been lost to time, but still resides in our subconscious, in the corner of the pitch-black room, in the silence of the night our ancestors knew to fear. That mediation resonates, even when the surface narrative looks murky. Weerasethakul’s Memoria doesn’t give too many answers. It moves at an interminable pace. But those are mostly strengths rather than faults, methods that force the audience to engage with the thoughts and collective memory buried deep within their psyches. In that sense, Memoria is a sensory explosion, and its dense, immersive shrapnel isn’t easily removable.

Memoria does not yet have a U.S. release date, but NEON has acquired distribution rights and describes it as “coming soon.”

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‘Memoria’ Review: Apichatpong’s Latest Is More Meditation Than Movie and Masterful for That Reason

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“ Memoria ” begins with the first jump scare in Apichatpong Weerasethakul ’s career, but the sudden impact isn’t as relevant as the way it resonates in the silence that follows. Anyone familiar with the slow-burn lyricism at the center of the Thai director’s work knows how he adheres to a dreamlike logic that takes its time to settle in. The Colombia-set “Memoria,” his first movie made outside his native country, does that as well as anything in “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” or “Cemetery of Splendor.” But this time around, there’s a profound existential anxiety creeping in.

With Tilda Swinton’s puzzled gaze as its guide, “Memoria” amounts to a haunting, introspective look at one woman’s attempts to uncover the roots of a mysterious sound that only she can hear. More than that, it’s a masterful and engrossing response to rush of modern times and the collective amnesia it creates. Anyone frustrated by its patience only serves to prove the point.

All of which means that “Memoria” is more meditation than movie, a transfixing deep-dive into the profound challenges of relating to people and places from the outside in. Jessica (Swinton) is already feeling out of place when the movie begins, as she abruptly awoken by a deep, explosive thump that materializes out of nowhere. A British botanist based in Medellin, Jessica travels to Bogotá to visit her sister (Agnes Brekke), whose husband puts her in touch with a sound engineer named Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego).

Describing the noise as both “a ball of concrete hitting a metal wall surrounded by seawater” and “a rumble from the core of the Earth,” Jessica works through a couple of options with her new friend until he more or less manages to imitate with his soundboard. But that doesn’t get her any closer to the root of the noise, or why it seems to haunt at the most unpredictable moments.

The official explanation for Jessica’s malady might be “Exploding Head Syndrome,” which the director himself apparently experienced at some point in his life, but “Memoria” doesn’t dig into the hard science. Instead, it roams alongside Jessica’s quest in a kind of fugue state, deepening the sense of displacement that surrounds her until it reaches a stunning and strange revelation in its final act. Apichatpong’s filmmaking exists within the hypnotic quality that comes from sitting in silence, surrounding by diegetic sounds, for minutes at end until subtle details come to light. “Memoria” is the purest distillation of that: Despite a single CGI twist that may or may not be imagined, its most adventurous visuals stem from the immersive greenery of the Colombian countryside where Jessica eventually finds herself, surrounded by inexpressible details of people and history that preceded her arrival.

Swinton’s distinctive physique is particularly effective in the story of a white woman roaming an alien landscape, a concept that gets quite literal as the story moves along. The performance plays like a prolonged homage to Maria Vetto’s turn in Lucrecia Martel’s “The Headless Woman,” another movie about feeling out of place with one’s surroundings as they continue to drift along. In this case, as Swinton gazes at her surroundings with a blend of shock and curiosity, the movie becomes an extension of her unsteady relationship to the historical resonance around her. As one man inexplicably vanishes from the plot (he literally ceases to exist) and another with the same name takes his place, Jessica begins to understand that the sudden, jolting noise haunting her head stems from a profound disconnection with her everyday routine. The sound tells a story, but it’s not her own.

This quest has a certain reflexive quality to it. The filmmaker is himself an outsider in a society that has a complex history of violence and class struggle. “Memoria” turns on the desire to understand those profound layers of national identity while acknowledging that some answers will always remain shrouded by the inscrutability of the past. Just as “Uncle Boonmee” alluded to its country’s history of political violence through supernatural events, “Memoria” uses its intricate sound design — and one very weird, very fleeting sci-fi twist — to explore the way Colombia has modernized over the years, even as its indigenous roots remain hidden in plain sight. That contrast comes to light in the transfixing final act, when Jessica ventures to the countryside to check out an archeological dig and instead finds herself in a prolonged, sleepy exchange with a man who finally provides some measure of an explanation for her mental disorder. Their exchange pushes Apichatpong’s liberated non-narrative style to a certain extreme, with results so bold that could very well alienate all but his most passionate followers. But it’s an immersive gamble well worth the risk.

By the time the movie gets there, Apichatpong has enacted a remarkable existential plunge. Re-teaming with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, the director brings his careful, mostly stationary compositions into a busier milieu than usual. “Memoria” spends its first half following Jessica through modern-day Bogotá, lingering on a prolonged jazz session at one moment, the busy city streets the next, and at one point sitting with an empty plot of greenery surrounded by glass. That last one is less metaphorical than poetic: It conveys a certain kind of emptiness filled by the rush of contemporary people and places, leaving no space to contemplate anything that came before them.

But “Memoria” does. In his own precise, abstract manner, Apichatpong has made an ecological disaster movie about the danger involved in ignoring the natural state of things and the people who respect it. Jessica’s early encounters set the stage for the arrival of a parochial character afraid to engage with anything beyond the small, quiet environment at his immediate disposal. “Experiences are harmful” to his memory, he says, and by the time the movie arrives there, we can relate. The explosion that Jessica hears may be something out of this world, but “Memoria” remains firmly planted in it, hoping against hope to understand what it has to say.

“Memoria” premiered in Competition at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. Neon releases it later this year.

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Memoria Reviews

Memoria entices with its aural preoccupations, but the film is rich with many other ideas and explorations.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2023

Weerasethakul expertly manipulates our auditory senses to make us feel fear, peace, and anxiety as we watch his feature.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 25, 2023

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria is both romantic and hallucinatory, sumptuously presented and emotionally engaging piece of magical realism that explores and expands the limitations of human experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 90/100 | Nov 18, 2022

The film casts a wonderful spell—a warm, comforting spell that wipes clear the doors of perception—and it could only work in a theatrical setting.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 6, 2022

Explores our relationships with ourselves, with others, and with the earth itself, capturing how every single molecule on this planet is influenced by the history of all that has come before it.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Sep 22, 2022

A bewitching whisper of a film that leaves the imprint of a haunting banger.

Full Review | Aug 29, 2022

"What was that sound?” is another way of asking: What do I know about the material world and how it behaves? Memoria’s sound design nudges prosaic scraps of ambient noise into the spotlight.

Full Review | Aug 19, 2022

One sequence, set by a riverside outside of Bogotá, depicts the thin line between life and death with heart-stopping clarity, making us aware of the smallest physical movements that prove more mesmerizing and rewarding than the typical spectacle...

Full Review | Jul 9, 2022

An untransferable experience that is also shared simultaneously, much like the epiphany of a memory that we remember as our own, but then find out others also treasure it. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 7, 2022

The film could've also been titled Mystery. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 7, 2022

We're at the time of dusk when the world is plunged into gloom and sounds have become sedating white noise. We're in a Weerasethakul film, and his camera seems to want us to close our eyes. But no, you can't really sleep on this. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 5, 2022

Plunged into the sweetest, most vertiginous epiphany, this critic found himself transported to an original state, seeing the real [world] with fresh eyes as if it were the first time. [Full review in Spanish]

A trip to the past, to the collective memories of society and all the preexisting cultures that inhabited the land... Offers ideas on Buddhist meditations more than a political commentary. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 5, 2022

Memoria is a psychedelically inspired allegory, an impressionistic inquiry into human existence, including ignorance and insight, suffering and enlightenment.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 2, 2022

[Weerasethakul and Swinton are] both devastatingly precise in what they do, too, and also delightfully expressive. And, they each force you to pay the utmost attention to their every single choice as well.

Full Review | Jun 24, 2022

"Memoria" is a masterwork for the most devoted of movie fans who need an escape from the noise of the modern world. It's wildly beautiful and imaginative, challenging your patience and outlooks on life and death.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | May 31, 2022

“Memoria” should be experienced, if one is comfortable doing so, in a theater with a rich sound system. The journey Weerasethakul takes us on is sonic as well as cinematic, and that takes some extra space.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 29, 2022

Apichatpong's film – which is, yes, a fundamental experience to understand the future of contemporary audiovisual media – becomes an absolutely hypnotic cross between the work of Borges and 'Close Encounters or the Third Kind'. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 27, 2022

The film maintains the inveterate intentions of the Thai director: dreamy, abstract, and not suitable for all palates. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | May 27, 2022

It absorbs you and pulls you into a trance. Once you return to the surface it's impossible to comprehend, exactly, where you've been.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 26, 2022

Screen Rant

Memoria review: tilda swinton elevates this elusive, surreal drama.

Steeped in soundscapes that soothe and unsettle, Memoria unfurls like a fever dream about memory, displacement, and the mysteries of existence.

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is known for the dream-like, slow-burn tint that is wrapped around his cinematic oeuvre, be it Tropical Malady or Cemetery of Splendor . His Memoria embraces a similar aura, creating a window into a world that feels ephemeral and timeless all at once while etching an audio-visual synesthesia like no other. Steeped in soundscapes that soothe and unsettle, Memoria unfurls like a fever dream about memory, displacement, and the mysteries of existence.

What Memoria intrinsically means, or in simpler words, what it is about, is difficult to articulate in words. Not only is the film richly layered and wildly interpretative, but also one that is bound to resonate in deeply personal ways with the viewer or not at all, given the glacial nature of most scenes. Memoria opens with almost ten minutes of night-time silence, punctuated by a sudden, rumbling sound that wakes Jessica (Tilda Swinton) from her slumber. The exact nature of the sound is unknown, and she gets up to investigate the source but is unable to fully comprehend it. The deathlike silence of the night is once again pierced by a chain of car alarms, which stops as suddenly as it begins, cementing the unusual, hypnotic sensory experience that defines the core of Memoria .

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Jessica resides in Medellín but is currently visiting her ill sister in Bogotá, who is an archaeologist involved in a century-long excavation project adjacent to the Andes mountains. Wishing to delve deeper into the source of the sound (which she starts hearing quite erratically), Jessica approaches sound technician Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), who attempts to recreate the sound by putting together sonic samples. “ It’s earthier, like a rumble from the core of the earth, ” Jessica explains. And while the inexplicable sound might feel and sound different for everyone, it surely is closer to a cavernous roar, a shamanic drum.

As sound is integral to the film’s base language, the scenes unravel more along the lines of a sonic experience as opposed to the visual: the quiet humdrum of an open eatery, the sound of cicadas at night occasionally disrupted by a shout of joy by passersby, the gentle bubbling of a stream, or the stark, often-unbearable empty silence of open spaces. As Jessica frantically searches for answers, her sense of reality also appears to shift somehow, especially when she ventures more towards the countryside. Things are calmer, slower in those spaces, where the self is more spiritually attuned, and the rhythms of a fish being scaled or a fight breaking out between howler monkeys make for a trancelike watch.

Memoria is admittedly an unconventional experience, one that feels both familiar and alien, which might objectively go either way in terms of audience immersion. Some scenes are allowed to reveal themselves at a languid pace, which can either be sleep-inducing or hypnotic, depending on one’s state of mind during the viewing experience. The ending of Memoria is baffling in a haunting way, as expected of a scenario in which a woman with unexplained inconsistencies in her memory meets a man who remembers everything, including events prior to the conception of time. The lull of Memoria would be non-existent without Swinton’s breathtaking presence, as she grounds and elevates the elusive drama with incredible nuance.

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Memoria  has had an extremely limited theatrical release since December 26, 2021. The film is 136 minutes long and is rated PG for some thematic elements and brief language.

Key Release Dates

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

A woman from Scotland, while traveling in Colombia, begins to notice strange sounds. Soon she begins to think about their appearance. A woman from Scotland, while traveling in Colombia, begins to notice strange sounds. Soon she begins to think about their appearance. A woman from Scotland, while traveling in Colombia, begins to notice strange sounds. Soon she begins to think about their appearance.

• Apichatpong Weerasethakul
• Tilda Swinton
• Agnes Brekke
• Daniel Giménez Cacho
• 100 User reviews
• 133 Critic reviews
• 92 Metascore
• 9 wins & 27 nominations

• Jessica Holland
• Karen Holland

• Juan Ospina
• Mateo Ospina

• Young Hernán Bedoya

• Agnes Cerkinsky
• Doctor Constanza
• Older Hernán Bedoya

• Anthropologist Assistant
• (uncredited)
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia In an unconventional move, art-house film distributor Neon is releasing Memoria in the USA "from city to city, theater to theater, week by week, playing in front of only one solitary audience at any given time." And furthermore, according to IndieWire (10/5/21) the film will only play in theaters and it will not become available on DVD, on demand, or on streaming platforms. They later abandoned this release strategy though after touring through only New York and Chicago and the film was eventually released in many cities simultaneously across North America in April, 2022.

Older Hernán Bedoya : I remember everything, so I limit what I see.

• Connections Referenced in Radio Dolin: Stream with Anton Dolin (2021)
• Soundtracks Memoria Written by César López Piano performed by César López Cello performed by Sandra Parra Recorded by Julio Monroy Recorded in Bogotá, Columbia by Burning (C) 2020 Burning

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 16 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
• D-Cinema 48kHz 7.1

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Apichatpong Weerasethakul ’s “ Memoria ” starts with a bang, which is not at all typical of the infamously understated Thai auteur, making his return to Cannes competition 11 years after winning the Palme d’Or for “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.” Nor is working with an internationally recognized movie star, which the director does this time around, enlisting Tilda Swinton as a kind of stand-in for himself in this oblique and sometimes taxing excursion into the jungles of Colombia.

Swinton plays a foreign-born orchidologist plagued by a strange condition whereby it sounds as if a gong is ringing inside her head — or else a wrecking ball is smashing loudly against a steel drum somewhere off in the distance. The opening bang, therefore, is a literal one, not some big set-piece or action sequence, lest you think the independent art-house director has sold out and decided to go all Hollywood for what’s been misleadingly described as his English-language debut. While Swinton does speak a bit of English, most of her dialogue is delivered in carefully articulated Spanish, as Jessica tries to figure out what the heck she’s hearing.

Apparently, the disturbing sound — which echoes no fewer than 55 times over the course of the film — was inspired by a recurring noise that Weerasethakul himself experienced, thereby recalling the tinnitus and other (tropical) maladies that Pedro Almodóvar revealed in his recent Palme d’Or contender “Pain & Glory.” But here, rather than earning sympathy for having shared such a personal diagnosis, the director seems to be inflicting this rather obnoxious ailment on the audience, turning these loud, impossible-to-anticipate aural bursts into tiny terrorist attacks, interrupting an otherwise largely Zen-like viewing experience.

Weerasethakul’s films may shock at times, coaxing images out of nightmares and the darker corners of the subconscious, but they tend to do so quietly, leaving audiences to mull 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, or the red-eyed primates of “Uncle Boonmee”).

During the unhurried movie’s relatively accessible first hour and a half, Jessica could be a kind of 21st-century Mr. Hulot, saying little as she ambles about modern Medellín, surrealistically subdivided and framed in ways Jacques Tati might have appreciated. She spends her days either visiting her sister in the hospital or investigating orchid-threatening fungi in the university library. While hanging about one of these institutions, Jessica meets a professor, who invites her in to examine a 6,000-year-old human skeleton. With the academic’s blessing, she hesitantly stretches out a finger and probes the hole bored in the ancient skull. To citizens of the future, “modern medicine” will surely seem as primitive.

Rather than consult a doctor about her own condition, Jessica opts to visit one of her husband’s former students, Hernan (Juan Pablo Urrego), who works in a recording studio. It’s a sign of the film’s unhurried sense of time that Jessica takes a seat and waits as he finishes listening to a piece of music. When it’s her turn, she does her best to describe the banging, as Hernan pulls samples from a library of movie sound effects to help re-create what she’s been hearing — a wonderful scene that plays like the audio equivalent of watching someone describe an intruder to a police sketch artist.

Hernan, who moonlights with a punk band called the Depth of Delusion Ensemble, then takes it upon himself to compose a piece of music that incorporates the noise. Weerasethakul 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. But then Jessica decides to hit the road, leaving the clamorous city — with its 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. In either case, Jessica’s surprised to meet a friendly local fish scaler with the same name.

Their connection consumes the rest of the film, which grinds to a halt as she spends the next 45 minutes studying him. Hernan No. 2 (Daniel Giménez Cacho) claims to remember everything. “That’s why I never watch movies or television,” he says. It’s a curious thing for him to tell an orchid specialist, but it makes sense if we read Jessica as the director’s stand-in: a filmmaker questioning the power and limitations of his medium. Like this self-described human “hard disk,” cinema documents things for posterity, but there’s so much it cannot capture — a running theme throughout Weerasethakul’s oeuvre, where shadowed images have a way of bleeding into the background and we often doubt our own eyes. When Weerasethakul finally reveals the source of the noise, the explanation is even harder to believe.

In “Memoria,” the disruptive sounds Jessica hears are 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. To that old riddle, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?,” Weerasethakul might reply: Of course, and it’s been echoing there ever since. You just have to train yourself to listen.

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Memoria (Review): An Enticing, Beguiling Masterpiece

• William Stottor
• January 3, 2022

Memoria is director Apichatpong Weerasethakul at his best and most daring, with its hypnotic tone and startlingly refreshing conclusion.

Memoria is, in the best way, a challenging and mysterious piece of art house cinema . It may see Palme d’Or-winning director Apichatpong Weerasethakul ( Syndromes and a Century , Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives ) shift away from his native Thailand with regards to both language and setting – here moving to Colombia and writing in English and Spanish – but he loses none of his capability of tapping into otherworldly realms. Memoria bears his usual trademarks: hypnotic long takes, refined dialogue, no forceful narrative. Even the opening title of the film, usually included as late as halfway through his previous films, only enters the screen in the end credits. Weerasethakul has long established himself as a master of slow cinema, with Memoria being further strong evidence to support this, yet his latest also cements his status as an uncategorisable, genre-defying director , one who pushes the boundaries of cinema, in the process blurring the line between what it means to watch a film as well as experience one.

Similar to Weerasethakul’s masterpiece, Tropical Malady (2004), Memoria can be observed in a simple sense as a film of two parts . In a more detailed sense, that is untrue – both films have distinctive tonal, narrative or location shifts yet their parts still feel cohesive and linked – but it may make it easier to comprehend Memoria ’s complexities. Tilda Swinton ( We Need to Talk About Kevin , The Souvenir: Part II ) is a Scottish woman living in Medellín and visiting her sister, who is in hospital ill, and husband in Bogotá. Swinton is unsurprisingly the perfect foil for Weerasethakul, with her awkward, human demeanour and mysterious intrigue, not to mention her full commitment to this wonderfully bizarre role and film. A hypnotic opening shot of Swinton’s Jessica in her bedroom at night, shrouded in darkness, is punctuated abruptly by a strange bang or thud, a noise that will jolt you out of your trance and run goosebumps down your arms. Memoria is no horror film, but this noise – one which only Jessica can hear and drives the narrative as it continues to plague her – is purposefully unsettling and unclassifiable, and is an auditory jolt that will work best if seen in a cinema.

From here, Jessica sees an audio engineer to see if they can recreate this sound, before the final part sees her enter the jungle of Colombia in her quest for discovery . It is in this rural setting where Weerasethakul is most at home, with his clear obsession with death, the afterlife, the otherworldly and reincarnation in Memoria , as with his other films, remarkably embedded into our natural world. It is difficult to describe Memoria ’s direction in dealing with these themes without going into spoiler territory, but they are here again and yet are largely dispensed differently to his previous works. Suffice to say, Jessica’s journey of discovery is completely unpredictable . Weerasethakul does just enough to make his new film unique, resting on his impressive qualities of earlier films whilst delivering something wholly distinctive and daring; in other words, Memoria is a dynamite piece of fan service. If anything, Memoria is one of Weerasethakul’s most accessible films too; he never slams his foot down on the narrative accelerator, but it certainly has more structure than something like Uncle Boonmee .

Few directors can stick an ending like Weerasethakul, and in Memoria , the final part effectively starts approximately 45 minutes before the credits roll, marking its conclusion as a unique, entrancing finale . Weerasethakul, however, goes one step further, inserting an almost preposterous scene about 10 minutes from the end, one that will likely baffle most people at first glance. Yet where many directors would cut to black and finish things there for shock value, Weerasethakul reverts back to his comfort zone, adding in quiet slow takes of characters and jungle scenery which are enhanced by glorious cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom ( Call Me by Your Name ) and absorbing sound design. This doesn’t lessen the absurd bravery of Memoria ’s conclusion, but merely strengthens it in its unearthly complexity . And when Weerasethakul does then cut to black and the title finally enters the screen, you will quite likely feel lightheaded and transported, glued to your seat with your jaw dropped to the floor.

Part of Memoria ’s appeal is its open-ended ambiguity ; Weerasethakul never has and never will shove you down a certain narrative or thematic path. Instead, Memoria , like his other films, invites you to draw your own conclusions, never marking any of them out as right or wrong and never becoming a frustrating experience even in the face of this uncertainty. There is an enjoyable, satisfying challenge to Memoria , a film which plays out rather matter-of-factly for a large portion before delving into one of the bravest and most challenging conclusions of the year. What is clear is that there is plenty hidden below the surface of Memoria , a dense and detailed filmic enigma reflective of our own complex world, and beyond.

Memoria was released in cinemas in the UK by Sovereign Distribution on 14 January, 2021, and will be out on digital platforms from 20th June , and on a special dual format Blu-ray collector’s edition & DVD on 25th July . In the US, the film premiered on December 26 at the IFC Center , where it ran for an exclusive one-week-only limited engagement, before moving to other cities in 2022. As explained by NEON , the film’s North American distributor, the film was released in the US with a “deliberate and methodical approach, moving from city to city, […] playing in front of only one solitary audience at any given time.”

• TAGS: Apichatpong Weerasethakul , Tilda Swinton

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John Bizub is a 20-year-old film student at Fairfield University…

One of the latest discussions within the film community is displaying filmmakers with a slow or calming pace or camera work as “slow cinema”. While many seem to disagree due to the nature of what makes “fast cinema” if “slow cinema” is an added label. Filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky , Terrance Malick ,  Tsai Ming-Liang,  and even throw in  Edward Yang are often praised for their methodical editing and meditative atmospheres created within their films. However, the so-called “godfather” or “champion” in regard to this discussion is none other than Thailand filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul .

Behind the Filmmaker and Memoria

At times going under the name “Joe” to save time throughout interviews and discussions, within his filmography Weerasethakul creates such a thick and resonating atmosphere, like a fog that you can barely make out the other side of. My interpretation of his films feels like a cross-breed between the video game Silent Hill 2  with its dense atmosphere and fog combined with abstract and thought-provoking thematics, combined with the music of ambient group  Aphex Twin  and the likes of  Brian Eno , with its relaxing and transformative nature and pacing that creates experiences the viewer will never forget, but I digress.

Joe  has done this throughout his entire filmography, with his “signature style” consistently being praised as they drag their film narrative themes forward. His 2010 Palme d’Or winning film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives , is a film about a family slowly coming to terms with the death of a loved one and the ghostly figure of another that nearly haunts or watches over them. His “slow burn” style comes full force as it enhances the family’s grieving as only time can act as a solution to grieving and fruition. His trademark allows for mind-expanding ideas such as the infamous ape-like figure appearing in Uncle Boonmee .

Weerasethakul returns to the arthouse film landscape with his newest film,  Memoria , which marks his first English language feature with Tilda Swinton leading the cast. The film tells the story of “Jessica”, a botanist who suddenly is woken up by a mysterious loud *BANG* noise. This noise continuously drives her mad and asks a local sound designer to help her recreate the sound. Like Joe ‘s previous films, the plot synopsis is only the surface level and thus asks audiences to decipher the plethora of narrative throughlines and themes spread throughout the film.

NEON’s Controversial Release Plan

Before discussing Memoria  as a film from my perspective, I think it is best to discuss the elephant in the room, the film distribution, “NEON”, and the release window for this film. After the North American premiere for Memoria took place at the 2021 “New York Film Festival”, the respected independent film studio decided against the standard limited to wide release window and is now releasing in theaters for one to two weeks in every theater, forever.

The studio would announce theater plans weekly on social media pages and the official Memoria webpage. While many film fans seem to be divided towards this, I for one understand the sentiment NEON placed with this film. The film is not a huge sell for many and thus making the film arrive in local cinemas an event for film fans. However, I digress.

Discussing  Memoria

Apichatpong Weerasethakul  creates yet another richly dense movie however another win in his filmography. At times rivaling to be my favorite film in his filmography. I think this goes without saying that this film deserves the theatrical experience. The bangs heard from Swinton’s character are loud and hit the viewer like a ton of bricks, rivaling the sound design in some late studio horror movies. However, that is a testament to the film’s wonderful sound design. Weerasethakul  creates such a layered atmosphere here, from the loud car honks towards the beginning of the film to the rich nature sounds in the final act, he is a filmmaker of complete immersion and locks in the viewer from the first frame.

With the film’s luscious cinematography,  Joe creates a new type of area within the Columbia landscape, one that feels lived in and natural. Memoria ‘s pacing feels daunting for newcomers to Weerasethakul ‘s work, however like the sound design, he locks you from the first moment and does not let go long after the credits roll. It is a slow burn but will continuously live in your brain for years, at times creating some beautiful landscapes that I am still reeling over. While the story feels dense, it is rich with discussion. Themes of memory and dreams carry the film, at times wondering if the loud bang is real or a dream from Tilda Swinton ‘s “Jessica”. Speaking of  Swinton , while the film contains minimal dialogue, she is given such raw emotion throughout the film. You beg to ask questions with her and empathize with her past and her unforeseen future.

The best example of the experience watching this film is that you are dreaming but not fully sleeping. And I mean this in the most positive sense. Memoria  is a standout in  Joe ‘s filmography. Contains some of his best-filmed sequences coupled with thematics that Joe breathes new life into. If there is one movie to keep your eyes on in terms of theatrical moviegoing, it is  Memoria , and while it will not work for some, others will find a newfound appreciation for Weerasethakul ‘s slow-burn and rich atmosphere.

Have you seen  Memoria?  Do you agree? Let us know in the comments below!

Memoria premiered on July 15, 2021!

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John Bizub is a 20-year-old film student at Fairfield University and has loved film for their entire life! When John is not watching and reviewing movies, they are listening to music, another passion for them, as well as playing video games!

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The story behind Memoria, Tilda Swinton’s mediative new film

Thai filmmaker apichatpong weerasethakul discuss his latest cinematic odyssey memoria, starring tilda swinton in an exploration into the human mind and memory.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria is an ocean of transcendent moments, my favourite of which is when Tilda Swinton observes a man falling asleep in real time. Jessica, an orchidologist played by Swinton, encounters a fish scaler, Hernán, who claims he cannot dream. Per Jessica’s request, he cradles himself next to a river, shuts his eyes, and eventually drifts off. The “action set-piece”, shot as a lengthy take, would be arduous, if not unimaginable, in the hands of most directors, but under Weerasethakul’s guidance, it’s a magical, time-manipulating reminder of why the theatrical experience will always trump streaming.

Filmmakers always insist they direct for the big screen, but Weerasethakul truly means it. In America, Neon vow that Memoria will never be released for laptops or home entertainment; in the UK, Sovereign’s rollout is exclusive to theatres. My first viewing was during the 2021 London Film Festival at Southbank’s Royal Festival Hall: more than 2,000 bodies collectively hypnotised in the dark, watching Swinton watching someone sleep.

Then again, I sometimes wondered if the cinemagoer in front of me was also napping. Such is the soothing, somnolent rhythm of his oeuvre, Weerasethakul considers it a compliment if viewers doze off. So much so, the Thai director’s features and shorts screened overnight in 2016 at the Tate Modern from 10pm to 1:45pm the following day. “It’s amazing to mix films with your dreams,” Weerasethakul says. “ Memoria is one thing at night. During the day, it’s another.”

When I speak to Weerasethakul over Zoom, it’s in late October in 2021, and he’s at home in Phuket, in the south of Thailand. The 51-year-old director is both a niche name and also one of the biggest auteurs on the international film circuit. Although his releases don’t exactly dominate your local Odeon, they nearly always win something at Cannes: the Un Certain Regard prize with Blissfully Yours ; the Grand Jury award with Tropical Malady and Memoria ; and the Palme d’Or with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives .

18 years ago, Swinton wrote to Weerasethakul, expressing her admiration for Tropical Malady . Memoria marks both their long-awaited collaboration and also Weerasethakul’s first feature outside Thailand. “We tried to understand the history and memories of the place,” Weerasethakul says of Colombia. “ Tropical Malady was really personal and full of my own memories, but Memoria was an interpretation. It was about an absorption of other memories.”

In Medellín, Jessica has flown over to research botany, and to visit her sister, Karen, who’s in hospital with a mysterious illness. However, Jessica suffers from her own atypical malady: an bang noise occurs in her head at unexpected moments. In turn, she investigates Colombia as if she doesn’t belong to the same planet. Swinton, of course, has previously embodied extra-terrestrial creatures ( Friendship’s Death ), immortal beings ( Only Lovers Left Alive , Suspiria ), and whatever The Ancient One is ( Doctor Strange ). “My reference of Tilda is firstly as a friend, and then as someone who appeared in a Derek Jarman film ( Blue ),” the director says. “I’m not familiar with her other work, except that period, and also Orlando .

“(Tilda Swinton) came up with a certain spirit that made me see the film’s rhythm and its heart – without talking, but showing me” – Apichatpong Weerasethakul

“When we worked on Memoria , the idea of (her background playing) aliens didn’t come up, but maybe the idea of disconnection, that she’s not totally grounded, and is in between worlds. She came up with a certain spirit that made me see the film’s rhythm and its heart – without talking, but showing me.”

As Jessica reveals an abnormal talent for deciphering other people’s memories, was Weerasethakul tapping into Swinton’s empathy? “Tilda is really active, really fun, and full of humour, whereas Jessica is sombre. But just now, talking to you, maybe they’re the same person. Because when you talk about empathy, I think that Tilda Swinton is full of empathy. She can jump into any situation without planning. She says yes to everything. That shows a certain kind of empathy, to immediately just be in the present.”

Perhaps Jessica’s ailment is less an illness and more a superpower; a gift for perception so devastating, she detects soundwaves beyond what our mortal ears can hear. Does Weerasethakul also see the world differently? “I think everyone’s way of hearing and seeing is different.” He cites the viral test about a dress that looks blue to some, gold to others. “Each one of us accumulates experiences, and our brain interprets shapes and colours differently.”

OK, everyone’s vision is distinct, but surely his vision is a little more distinct? And that’s what makes his films so inimitable? “No, I just have an opportunity. It’s teamwork… and it’s still a mystery to me how to do a movie. With Memoria , I created a film that was different from what I had in my head at the conception in 2017. It’s not that I could see clearly what I wanted.”

Weerasethakul grew up and studied architecture in Thailand, before completing a masters in filmmaking at the Art Institute of Chicago. However, his films are extremely unamerican. His early features, Mysterious Object at Noon and Blissfully Yours , captured the sensuous pleasures of Thailand’s locale, the persistent buzzing of insects, the luxury of spontaneously wandering into the jungle. Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century further depicted the overlap between humans and nature, the living and the dead, the real and the unreal.

Then, in 2010, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives was an unlikely Palme d’Or winner, a bewitching fantasia in which a spirit joins the dining table, a princess loudly fucks a catfish, and it all makes sense. Around this period, Weerasethakul was sent scripts by American companies (“always about Thailand, often about boxing”) but he persisted with his own ideas. While Weerasethakul, who is gay, didn’t face trouble from Thai censors with his homosexual characters, the political themes were another matter. In 2015’s Cemetery of Splendour , a sleeping sickness sent soldiers into a coma; it wasn’t allowed to be released uncut in Thailand.

After Cemetery of Splendour , Weerasethakul vowed to no longer shoot in Thailand, picking Colombia as his first detour. Does Colombia sound different to Thailand? “I think so. The soundscape, the temperature, and the humidity always bring out a different sound. But in the end, human emotions are really universal.”

Memoria is Weerasethakul’s reunion with Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, the cinematographer who lensed the director’s early work up to Uncle Boonmee ; in the decade since, Mukdeeprom was the DoP on Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria . “(After Call Me By Your Name ) I think he’s been more free to interfere very little with my process… He supports very well, now, my use of minimal lighting. Actors shouldn’t be bothered by lights. They should be able to walk and explore their environment in long takes. He has to be discreet, and he delivers.”

“I had to be careful as a foreigner in how to approach it, and be respectful to people’s memory” – Apichatpong Weerasethakul

While Jessica avoids lengthy monologues about colonialism, Colombia’s history is present through the openness of Mukdeeprom’s camerawork. “I knew that the political subtext would be there,” Weerasethakul says. “I had to be careful as a foreigner in how to approach it, and be respectful to people’s memory. Jessica’s like cinema: she’s collecting sound and images, that’s all. The awareness of the trauma is already there in the audience, so it’s really active in terms of how the audience makes it work.”

Weerasethakul is considering shooting his next film in Mexico, but first there’s the unexpected controversy over Memoria ’s release. Neon’s so-called “Never-Ending Theatrical Tour” in America means that it’ll only play one cinema at a time, moving from city to city, week by week. In an age when Dune went straight to HBO Max (and, you know, torrents) on its day of release, it’s a rarity for such a small film to reject streaming. However, Memoria could become unavailable to people who are disabled, scared of COVID, or not geographically near a screening.

“Because the States is so big, if you blanket the film in the whole country in one week, it’ll be gone quickly, and it’ll be streaming,” Weerasethakul says. “I don’t feel Memoria is made for streaming. I think people will understand once they see the film that it’s about the cinema experience. The images and sounds were designed for that. We made this tour because of precisely that – it’ll go to your town, whereas before it wouldn’t.

“It’s a chance for people, if they’re patient, to wait, and it’ll be there. It’s already in many cities because of film festivals, and then for regular release, it’ll go town to town, and have a direct communication with cinemas, to sustain that. It’s a very small film, but it’s a symbol, that we need to save independent and local cinemas. It activates that space, and makes you feel like this is precious: your cinema in your town is showing this.”

So to double-check, would he prefer someone didn’t watch Memoria at all, if they’re otherwise going to stream it? “Yes. Memoria is not my film on a laptop. It’s another film… Sound has a 3D quality. The image, OK, is flat – the bigger, the better. But sound has a sculptural quality that you cannot create.”

To end, I ask Weerasethakul about a Q&A I attended for Cemetery of Splendour in 2015. On stage, Weerasethakul remarked that, one day, movie characters shitting on screen will be as normal as seeing, for instance, a family at the dinner table. Does he still believe that to be true? “I do, actually,” he says. “Erections and defecating – what else did I say? I don’t know when, but they will. Because making cinema is about breaking taboos, little by little. The social taboos, the taboo of the image.”

Memoria is out in UK cinemas on January 14

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Common sense media reviewers.

Arthouse drama has complex themes, mild language.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The film does not have strong positive or negative

Most characters are not given strong positive or n

The lead character, Jessica, is a White woman, tho

Scenes in hospital, but no detail of injury or ill

One instance of strong language includes "bastards

Characters drink wine with dinner, but not to the

Parents need to know that Memoria is a slow-paced but interesting arthouse movie that explores complex notions such as the nature of reality, memory, and existential loneliness. Starring Tilda Swinton as a British woman staying in Colombia, characters speak both English and Spanish, with English subtitles for…

Positive Messages

The film does not have strong positive or negative messages per se, but more reflections on the nature of memory and reality. That said, there are some examples of perseverance and curiosity.

Positive Role Models

Most characters are not given strong positive or negative characteristics, but serve as people for lead character Jessica to interact with. She is haunted and confused but shows strength and inquisitiveness in trying to find answers.

Diverse Representations

The lead character, Jessica, is a White woman, though there is racial diversity within the cast, with Colombian actors playing the parts of the main Colombian characters. Jessica does not adhere strongly to female stereotypes and is shown to be independent and determined. Colombian characters represent both traditional and modern Colombia. For example, one is portrayed as a kindly sound engineer and another as an older man who has never left his remote jungle village. There is some reference to more folklore tradition, such as releasing bad spirits and curses, but this is not the overriding representation of the people. Jessica questions her perception of reality, but it is never confirmed whether this is a mental health issue or caused by outside forces.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Scenes in hospital, but no detail of injury or illness is shown. Virus, decay, bacteria, and wounds mentioned in poetry. A sick dog in need of a blood transfusion is related from a dream. A story involves someone being beaten up and later characters hear the sound of a beating. There is passing mention of animal cruelty. A character reacts to a bus backfiring by diving to the ground as though a shot has been fired. Tombs and curses are mentioned -- skulls and bones are seen, and there is mention of drilling into a head to release bad spirits. Reference is made to volcano tremors and water contamination. Someone displays mild seizure-like movements.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

One instance of strong language includes "bastards."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters drink wine with dinner, but not to the point of intoxication. Mention of Xanax, but it is not taken on-screen.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Memoria is a slow-paced but interesting arthouse movie that explores complex notions such as the nature of reality, memory, and existential loneliness. Starring Tilda Swinton as a British woman staying in Colombia, characters speak both English and Spanish, with English subtitles for Spanish dialogue. There is one use of the word "bastards," but otherwise no strong language, and characters drink wine with dinner, though not to excess. Mention of graves, illness, and death, and skulls and bones shown on-screen could feel gruesome for some. There is also reference to a beating and the sounds of an attack are heard. Moments of silence and stillness stretch on for large expanses of time and there is very little in terms of action -- which is unlikely to hold the attention of tweens and younger. But for the patient and those who don't require obvious answers, this is a beautiful, meditative film that offers something different from the norm. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In MEMORIA, Jessica Holland ( Tilda Swinton ) is a British woman staying in Colombia who begins to experience phantom sonic bangs that only she can hear. The sounds start to cause a bout of insomnia for Jessica and a feeling of detachment from those around her. At the same time she starts to doubt her experiences and memories. Is she having some kind of breakdown or are other forces at play? Her search for answers leads her deep into the jungle, where reality seems to fracture even further.

Is It Any Good?

His first film shot outside of Thailand and featuring an international star, this captivating film introduces Apichatpong Weerasethakul's meditative, otherworldly filmmaking to a much wider audience. Colombia's Oscar entry for Best International Feature Film, the stillness and silence of Memoria may frustrate some viewers but will enchant others as an exercise in mindfulness before entertainment. The eeriness created as Swinton's Jessica sits at the dinner table choosing to not even react to the sonic boom that nobody else can hear perfectly embodies the spiritual isolation the film explores. The nature of reality itself is a central theme here. Is it shared or individual? How much does it change with every tiny occurrence?

The director conjures a detached feeling that echos Jessica's insomniac state, as she tries to piece together fractures of what's real and what makes sense. An ongoing symphony of car alarms, characters that appear to traverse dimensions, and talk of ancient burial grounds tease other forces at play. But what there is at the heart of the film is an existential disorder perfectly embodied by Swinton's stripped-back, haunting portrayal.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about some of the themes raised in Memoria . The film seems to suggest at times that Jessica's experience of reality is not in sync with those around her. What do you understand of reality? Do we all share the same version of it, or could it be different for each of us?

Discuss the idea of an unreliable narrator. How might this be said to be applicable to Jessica?

The director uses silence and stillness to create a strong sense of atmosphere in the film. How did you feel about this kind of filming technique? Can you think of other films that use very little action to explore their themes?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 26, 2021
• Cast : Tilda Swinton , Elkin Diaz , Jeanne Balibar
• Director : Apichatpong Weerasethakul
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Neon
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Science and Nature
• Character Strengths : Curiosity , Perseverance
• Run time : 136 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG
• MPAA explanation : some thematic elements and brief language
• Last updated : July 22, 2022

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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‘memoria’: film review.

Sam Dillon and Thomas Mann co-star in a third adaptation from James Franco’s short-story collection.

By Justin Lowe

Justin Lowe

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Memoria Still - Publicity - H 2016

Following Palo Alto (2013) and Yosemite (2015), Memoria concludes the trilogy of films adapted from James Franco’s Palo Alto short stories. Returning as executive producer for the final installment, Franco has again selected novice feature directors for the project, which was originally announced at the launch of a successful 2013 Indiegogo fundraising campaign.

Although the film should attract attention from fans of Franco’s characteristically diverse body of work, at just 70 minutes it comes across as rather too tentative and brief to amount to much more than a sensitively observed but ultimately inconclusive coming-of-age narrative. Clearly the limited scope of Franco’s source material fits comfortably within Memoria ’s modestly scaled structure, but too often writer-directors Nina Ljeti and Vladimir de Fontenay neglect to adequately seize upon a thematic structure that implies a more encompassing significance to the characters’ struggles than the plot actually discloses.

Release date: May 06, 2016

The highly episodic first act may contribute to this underlying issue, as their protagonist quickly matures from a child to a young man in the space of just 20 minutes. Beginning with his childhood growing up on the grungier side of largely affluent Palo Alto, Calif., Ivan’s (Sam Dillon) detachment from his Russian mother (Julia Emelin ) and resentment towards his overbearing stepfather (Matt McCoy) mark him as a habitual loner. By the time he reaches 17, surrounded by a small clique of stoner and skater friends that includes bad boy Alex (Thomas Mann), hot-headed bully Chris (Bo Mitchell) and tough chick Nina (Ruby Modine ), he still feels isolated and awkward. Maybe it’s due to his experience growing up as the child of an immigrant unfamiliar with American suburban norms, or because he still feels abandoned by his military-veteran father, who returned to Russia when Ivan was only five years old.

Frequently skipping school while swathing himself in a halo of pot smoke, he attempts to remain below adults’ radar, but his teacher Mr. Wyckoff (Franco) wants to know why he hasn’t been attending English class and cautions Ivan to try and submit some classwork to avoid failing. Shy and remote, he avoids girls after previous disappointments, then reacts with shock and resentment when Nina expresses feelings for him after years of platonically hanging out. His fitful attempts at writing poetry for Wyckoff’s class yield encouraging results, but conflicts at home and school push him closer to a crisis, as his already tenuous relationships fray even further.  

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Memoria ’s early scenes reveal an almost lyrical quality, as young Ivan ( Kaden Ecklund ) sneaks out of the house to go swimming alone in a nearby pond at dusk, or plays with his toy warplanes, imagining the return of his absent father. In his formative years as a middle-schooler, his sometimes self-conscious attempts to fit in with his classmates or attract the attention of a pretty girl evoke familiar growing pains, but by the time he reaches adolescence, Ivan has become almost destructively self-absorbed. While this type of character arc isn’t unusual for teen dramas, it lacks any really significant developments that would set Ivan apart from his peers, many of whom are even less engaged than he is.

Franco collaborator Ljeti and co-director de Fontenay make some initially interesting stylistic choices, including restrictive framing necessitated by an atypical 4:3 aspect ratio, non-narrative flashback sequences and almost exclusively handheld lensing . The film’s overall aesthetic never regains its early contemplative qualities, however, settling instead for conventional low-budget production values that aren’t improved by generic settings that reduce Franco’s typically verdant hometown to a series of nondescript streets and ugly stucco homes.  

At the same time, the filmmakers’ scripting often is weighed down by unimaginative representations of teenage conflict. Part of the challenge also lies with Dillon’s restrained lead performance, which attempts to rely more on brooding reticence than the actor has the maturity to adequately convey, although the unfiltered teen dialogue remains consistently authentic, even when it’s almost gratuitously crude. However, the implication that Ivan’s inability to contemplate adulthood is rooted in pervasive memories about the loss of his father (who is never depicted onscreen) remains too insubstantial to sufficiently define his character.

Another issue is that Mann’s instinctively self-destructive Alex, an intriguing departure from his Me, Earl and the Dying Girl good-guy image, emerges as more interesting and impactful than Ivan’s constant self-pitying. Franco’s brief appearances as a caring and inquisitive teacher come across as perhaps too concerned with Ivan’s welfare, but that occasional, uncomfortable tension is never fully resolved.

With Franco preparing for the production or release of a wide-ranging slate of high-profile acting and directing projects, the inclination to reference the diminutive Palo Alto Stories trilogy may diminish, although the distinct thematic similarities running throughout the films seem likely to re-emerge in any comparably personal projects.  

Production company: Rabbit Bandini Productions Cast : Sam Dillon, Thomas Mann, Ruby Modine , Keith Stanfield , Miles Heizer , Bo Mitchell, Teo Halm , James Franco, Julia Emelin , Matt McCoy Directors-writers: Nina Ljeti , Vladimir de Fontenay Producers: Iris Torres, Sev Ohanian Executive producers: James Franco, Jennifer Kristen Howell, Vince Jolivette , Morgan Marling Director of photography: Pedro Gomez Millan Production designer: Katie Shattuck Costume designer: Angie Lavalla Editor: John Paul Horstmann Music: Ian Hultquist

Rated R, 70 minutes

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