General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Memoria

Memoria is a 2021 drama film directed by the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, starring Tilda Swinton as Jessica Holland, a Scottish woman in Colombia who is awakened by a loud "bang" she alone can hear and follows the sound into the country's landscapes and buried histories.¹ It is the director's first feature film made outside Thailand, with dialogue spoken mostly in Spanish and English.² The film competed at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and shared the Jury Prize with Nadav Lapid's Ahed's Knee.¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and screenwriter	Apichatpong Weerasethakul, winner of the 2010 Palme d'Or for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives¹^•⁴
Lead cast	Tilda Swinton (Jessica Holland), Elkin Díaz (older Hernán Bedoya), Jeanne Balibar (Agnès Cerkinsky), Juan Pablo Urrego (young Hernán Bedoya)¹
Premiere and award	In Competition at Cannes 2021; Jury Prize (ex-aequo with Ahed's Knee)¹^•³
Technical profile	136 minutes; 1.85:1; 4K and 35mm; sound in 7.1 and Dolby Atmos; Spanish and English⁵
Production countries	Colombia, Thailand, UK, Mexico, France, Germany, Qatar, among others; produced by Burning S.A.S, Kick The Machine, and Illuminations Films⁵
Filming	Chosen Colombia as its location in 2019, shot in Bogotá and Pijao with an international crew alongside Colombian professionals⁶
Critical reception	90% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 139 reviews; Metacritic score of 92⁷^•⁸
Release model	Distributed by Neon for theatrical exhibition only, on a traveling tour, with no streaming or home-video release intended⁹

Spoilers

Plot and structure

Ever since being startled by a loud "bang" at daybreak, Jessica (Tilda Swinton) is unable to sleep. While staying in Bogotá on a trip to see her sister, she strikes up a friendship with Agnes (Jeanne Balibar), an archaeologist examining human remains found in a tunnel that is being built. Jessica travels to the excavation site, and in a small town nearby she encounters a fish scaler, Hernan (Elkin Díaz); they share memories by the river, and as the day closes Jessica is awakened to a sense of clarity.⁷

The film returns to the two-part structure of Apichatpong's first four features. The first part is urban and broadly rational and scientific, set among a university campus, research labs, a lecture theater, and a library, where Jessica struggles to define and "capture" the noise in her head. A brief detour to La Linea, the roughly 8-kilometer tunnel through the Andes under construction to link Colombia's east and west coasts, marks the film's midpoint. In the second part, set in the countryside, Jessica is carried by her dreams along a path leading deep into territory beyond reason, and there she comes to sense and hear a man's memories, whether he is an extraterrestrial or not, and whether or not he is connected to what causes the auditory hallucinations.¹⁰

During her journey Jessica comes upon remnants of the nation's political past, most vividly a passerby who drops to the ground at the sound of a tire bursting, mistaking it for a terrorist bomb, as well as traces of ancient enigmas: the skull of a young woman, 6,000 years old, unearthed at La Linea, bearing signs that trepanation had been performed on her.¹⁰ In the film's key scene, Jessica meets the much older Hernán, who tells her, "I remember everything. So I try to limit what I see. That's why I never watch movies or TV."⁴

Sound as the film's method

Sound is central to Memoria beyond Jessica's condition. Rendering audible the sounds in Jessica's head, the director has said, puts the audience in touch with her senses: "We become her because we feel her."¹¹ The sound designer Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, who has worked on all of Apichatpong's films since Tropical Malady (2004), described the approach as using ambience to tell the story, calling it more important than music.¹²^•¹³ The film was mixed for two weeks, with 7.1, 5.1, and Atmos mixes delivered, and it is designed to match the sound capabilities of each theater in which it screens, because the range between its loudness and quietness is vast.¹³^•¹² In the scene where the young sound engineer reconstructs the noise from Jessica's descriptions, the on-screen scene lasts about 10 minutes; in reality Kalayanamitr, aided by sound designer Koichi Shimizu, made about 20 passes before landing on the final version.¹³

Apichatpong has said the sharpened focus on sound marked a shift in his thinking about his cinema, tracing it to the 2015 Fever Room performance, where he and his sound designers experimented with many speakers and their placement, and to Colombia itself: since he does not speak Spanish, he treated the language as sound, as music, and thinks of Memoria as a performance.¹⁰

Origins and inspirations

Jessica's aural hallucination is shared by the director himself. It is a rare and little understood phenomenon variously called "exploding head syndrome" and "auditory sleep starts"; Apichatpong came to regard the "bang" as a strange pleasure and even regretted its loss when it stopped, whereas it turns his protagonist into an insomniac.¹⁰ The character was first written as "Erika" but renamed Jessica Holland in honor of the character played by Christine Gordon in Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie (1943), a film Apichatpong has called one of his "beloved" films.¹⁰

The older Hernán's claim to total recall recalls Jorge Luis Borges's story "Funes the Memorious," but the book published to accompany the film reveals that Apichatpong drew on the real-life story of the Australian woman Rebecca Sharrock, who has HSAM ("Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory"), also known as hyperthymesia.¹⁰ For the film's preparation, the director listened to many stories in Colombia and incorporated his own memories of Thailand.¹⁴ He has described the film as presenting the entanglement of memories, personal and collective: Jessica wakes as an empty shell and absorbs memories of people and places, an "amplifier (or as Hernan puts it, an antenna)" walking through mountains that themselves hold layers of memory.²

Colombia as setting and production partner

Apichatpong chose Colombia after growing up in the 1970s reading Thai novels about hunters seeking the treasures of lost civilizations, stories whose Thai authors had adopted the romanticized Amazonian settings of colonial-era Western tales; he remained drawn to such a world.² He selected two cities, Bogotá and Pijao, as the film's setting.² In 2019 the production chose Colombia as its shooting location, and the film was made by an international team working with Colombian audiovisual professionals: Diana Bustamante producing through her company Burning, Angélica Perea on production design, César López composing the original music, and Raúl Locatelli of Mexico joining the sound department, among others.⁶ The cast was led by the British Tilda Swinton alongside the Colombian actors Elkin Díaz and Juan Pablo Urrego and the French Jeanne Balibar.⁶ The Mexican company Piano and Estudios Churubusco co-produced the film, which was funded in part through Mexico's EFICINE article 189 tax incentive.¹⁵^•¹⁶

Release and reception

After its Cannes premiere, where it won the Jury Prize ex-aequo with Ahed's Knee,¹^•³ the film screened at the Toronto, Rotterdam, London, New York, and Morelia film festivals.¹⁷ It won the Gold Hugo for Best Film at the Chicago International Film Festival in 2021.¹⁶

Theatrical-only release. Apichatpong and distributor Neon announced that Memoria would never be available on streaming or home video and would instead play theatrically in perpetuity, traveling from city to city on a never-ending tour; the original announcement that it would play only one theater at a time was later relaxed.⁹ The director was emphatic about the need to see the film communally in a theater, with its undistracting darkness and enveloping sound.¹⁸ Neon did eventually provide a screener DVD in its awards consideration package, prefaced by a video message from the director and Swinton reminding viewers the film was never intended for that format.⁹

Critics responded strongly: the film holds 90% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 139 reviews⁷ and a Metacritic score of 92,⁸ while audience ratings ran far lower, with an IMDb score of 6.4, making it a marked case of critic-audience divergence.⁸ Reviewers described it as the director's most accessible film yet, though still bewildering, and singled out its sound design; the critics' consensus on Rotten Tomatoes reads that Memoria finds Apichatpong "branching out into English-language filmmaking without forsaking any of his own lyrical cinematic vocabulary."⁹^•⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 2020–2022 films › Released 2020 to 2021

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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