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