One of several especially hypnotising scenes from Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cannes Jury Prize-winning latest film – his first to feature international star power, in the shape of Tilda Swinton – lands early in the piece, at a recording studio in the Colombian capital of Bogotá.
Jessica, played by an understated Swinton – operating on a plane light-years away from her over-the-top performances in films such as The French Dispatch – has a peculiar favour to ask young audio engineer Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego). She has been haunted by a particular sound – something that went whomp! in the night – since it startled her awake recently, and finds herself more and more compelled to identify the source.
At first, she had assumed the sound to be a product of early morning construction work nearby – but becomes unsettled when she's told by her brother-in-law Juan (Daniel Giménez Cacho, 2017's Zama), at whose house she's staying on her visit to Bogotá from Medellín, that there isn't any.
"It's like… a huge ball of concrete… that falls into a metal well… surrounded by sea water," Jessica tells Hernán, struggling to summon the requisite specificity, especially in her halting Spanish. The engineer gamely cycles through a catalogue of movie sound effects, manipulating them according to Jessica's feedback: "More earthy"; "more bass".
There's a gentle absurdity to the scene, acknowledged by the apologetic little laughs Jessica emits as she attempts to refine her description of this thing that may exist only in her mind, but it's weirdly gripping, too: the sound that haunts Jessica also haunts the viewer, who is in effect inducted as a fellow amateur detective; her companion on a mission that drifts inexorably into the metaphysical, tinged by science fiction.
Despite Memoria being the Thai master's first cinematic venture outside of his home country, its uncanny dimensions will feel familiar to those who have journeyed with him before: in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, his Palme d'Or-winning film from 2010, the titular character readily receives visitors who have already passed on as he prepares for his own passing; in Cemetery of Splendour, from 2015, comatose soldiers communicate from their hospital beds via psychic means.
In Apichatpong's thrillingly distinctive cinema, the boundaries between past and present, and between the material and the spiritual worlds, prove porous. Much as two colours layered create a third, these crossovers illuminate histories lost or repressed.
Never has this been more explicit than in Memoria – the title literally translating to 'memory', a term that has political resonance in Colombia, as a nation still processing the extent and impact of the intensely violent period that spanned the second half of the 20th century up until the peace process of 2016.
This historical trauma is not Jessica's: like Swinton, she is Scottish, and although she's been living in Colombia (ostensibly because of her work as an orchid farmer), she is fundamentally still a tourist. Nor does it belong to Apichatpong.
That both actor and filmmaker necessarily approached the landscape as foreigners, gingerly attempting to tune into its reverberations, was integral to the film's design.
Having discussed working together for more than a decade, they chose to meet on mutually uncommon ground: only in an alien environment could Swinton function as an analogue for Apichatpong. The recurrent 'whomp!' in Jessica's head and the attendant insomnia are rooted in his experience with the sleep disorder known as exploding head syndrome.
Sleep-deprived and furthermore encumbered by grief (there are subtle indications that she has recently lost her husband), Jessica – whom Swinton approached not as a character but a "predicament" – drifts through Bogotá and into the surrounding countryside in search of nothing more substantial than a sound.
Like her namesake, the mysterious Jessica Holland from Jacques Tourneur's 1943 voodoo horror I Walked with a Zombie, she is something of a sleepwalker.
The pacing is correspondingly somnambulant. Indeed, Apichatpong has always tended towards letting the action – if it can be called that – play out at a cool distance, with cuts and camera movement kept to a minimum. That's not to say that his films are austere; the tenderness they exude, and the almost impish humour, make the use of such a label misleading.
Rather, they are trance-inducing, capable of being utterly arresting in their quietude – which makes the bang with which Memoria opens (and closes, in a pretty wild reveal) doubly startling.
When Jessica returns to the recording studio to speak with Hernán again, she's told that no one by that name works there. But she does meet another Hernán later in the piece (played by Elkin Díaz), their encounter seeming more than a coincidence.
"This brings me close to what you call a dream," this older Hernán says to Jessica as he proffers a shot glass of homemade liqueur. It's a description that is eminently applicable to Memoria itself. Unlike most dreams, however, Memoria is likely to stay with you long after your blinking eyes have readjusted to the sunlight.
Memoria is in cinemas now.
