Plenty of films have been made “about things that go bump in the night”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. Memoria may be the first that is “about the actual bump itself” – a dense, metallic thud that reverberates through a bedroom in Bogotá, waking Jessica (Tilda Swinton), a British botanist who has come to the city to visit her ill sister Karen (Agnes Brekke). As this “mesmerically strange” story unfolds, “the noise keeps creeping up” on Jessica. It is “sometimes soft, sometimes heart-joltingly loud”, and yet “no one but her” seems able to hear it. Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “dreamlike avant-garde” films have always been at the “very edge” of what most audiences would think counts as cinema; this is “by far his most accessible” yet, because it’s essentially a “straightforward mystery”: “What made the sound, and where can Jessica find it?”
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