Memoria, review: Tilda Swinton stars in a mesmerising cosmic mystery

Many films have been made about things that go bump in the night, but Memoria may be the first about the actual bump itself – a dense, round, metallic thud that reverberates through a bedroom in Bogotá, Colombia, just before daybreak. The room’s occupant is Jessica Holland (Tilda Swinton), a British botanist from Medellín, and she rises blearily, her hair silhouetted against the stifled grey-pink light pushing through the curtains.

What was the noise? A burglar? Nearby building work? Jessica rises and walks slowly to her desk, and as the camera follows her movements it’s as if the room is still cohering around her. She sits down in a daze. In a nearby parking lot, one by one car alarms mysteriously begin to blare, then just as mysteriously switch off.

Of all the surprises Apichatpong Weerasethakul could have sprung on us, a horror-movie-style jump scare might be the most unforeseeable – but then with jump scares, that’s generally the idea. The Thai master’s brand of dreamlike avant-garde meanderings operate at the very edge of what general audiences would even consider to be cinema, lulling their viewers with weird imagery and long, tranquil takes into a blissed-out, psychologically pliable state.

But, from Memoria’s attention-grabbing opening onwards, Apichatpong’s latest feature proves to be by far his most accessible. It’s even built around a relatively straightforward mystery plot: what made the sound, and where can Jessica find it?

Let’s stress "relatively" in the sentence above: it’s still mesmerically strange, unflinchingly cerebral art house cinema, not Scooby-Doo. Jessica has come to Bogotá to visit her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke), who is in hospital with an unidentified illness. Outside of visiting hours, she visits a manufacturer of refrigeration units for plants – “in here, time stops,” an employee proudly says, pointing into the box – and also passes the time exploring the city’s university, taking an interest in all things bacterial and fungal, as well as some long-buried human remains that have been unearthed during the construction of a tunnel in the nearby countryside.

Throughout, the noise keeps creeping up on her – sometimes soft, sometimes heart-joltingly loud – yet no-one but her seems able to hear it. Swinton plays these moments brilliantly: you can sense Jessica suppressing her distress, as if the thuds were passing feelings of queasiness.

A friendly young sound engineer called Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) offers to try to recreate it using his mixing desk, and Jessica watches uneasily as the motorised faders slide up and down automatically, as if pushed by invisible fingers. But from her amusingly precise description – “it’s like a ball of concrete hitting a metal wall surrounded by seawater” – Hernán is able to gradually create a close approximation, and when you hear and recognise it, a shiver races up your neck.

More shivers are in store. A character disappears, then is found elsewhere, far from the city, having apparently aged around 20 years. Jessica’s wanderings take her into a dense green wilderness, buzzing with Henri Rousseau-like enchantment, where further surreal discoveries are made. One involves a startling (and beautiful) flourish of visual effects that finally identifies the source of the noise; another concerns an invisible flow of memories that emanate from that strange, aged double, which Jessica is somehow able to absorb.

The recurring fungal and archeological imagery suggest a conception of consciousness as a kind of mushroom patch, with human experience blooming from and feeding on the experiences that came before, all the way back to its unknowable cosmic beginnings.

U cert, 136 min. In cinemas from January 14