I’m a big fan of Tilda Swinton, and because of her I watched this unorthodox film, Memoria’s (2021) background took place in the countryside of Colombia, but it wasn’t in Bogotà. The movie was directed and written by Apichatpong Weerasethakul from Thailand. This was the first time I studied his work, I found some consistency during this movie. He liked static shots. They could be a steady panoramic view of a vista of Colombia forested mountains, a focused stoic shot of a window pane looking out to the wilderness, or a dead man laying on the ground eyes and mouth opened (will come back to this). Some of these lingering shots, 2-3 minutes without actions, gave us time and space for ruminative pondering, meditative gasping, or for some, profane wtf-ing too.

Tilda Swinton carried this film from top to bottom. She was mesmerizing as Jessica, who didn’t sleep at all. She was haunted by a sound no one else could hear, nor she could draw from her memory of such a sound. It wasn’t tinnitus for sure. The sound became her mission or vice versa, it’s hard to say. We can only follow the bread crumbs the director leaves with us during Jessica’s journey of discovery or was it an excavation of a buried mystery?

Jessica wakes up from a sound she cannot identify. She gets up from bed and searches for its origin within and outside of her apartment, but she doesn’t find anything…

She visits an audio studio in a university where she meets with Juan, a science engineer whom Jessica’s husband has asked for help to re-construct the sound she heard. After many trials from a sound database, Juan finds the sound mixtures and tones the sound based on.

At this point, the director deluded us with a possible romantic interlude between Jessica and Juan, but it didn’t flourish.

Instead, Jessica’s search for a commercial refrigerator leads her to a place where our mystery unfolds. The area she enters was a quarantined zone with military presents at checkpoints. The building of a tunnel has led to a discovery of an indigenous habitat estimated at 6,000 year-olds. Human remains have been uncovered (another red herring). Archaeologists are on site deep inside the tunnel measuring bones of different sizes.

Jessica is hearing the sound more often, it takes her to a remote area of trees and a downstream waterway. She comes across a dwelling. A local man has lived there since his birth: Hérnan. He does not dream, and he sleeps dead, literally.

I thought I had figured out this movie was about Carl Jung’s collective consciousness, and archetypal memory, I was completely flabbergasted with its ending.

The most intriguing conversation was between Hérnan and Jessica, ” I’m a hard-disc and you are like my antenna.”

WATCH!