Panicking over the prospect of missing it, I faced a forbiddingly freezing North London night for a last-minute solo cinema escapade. Coming from an exhausting day and being, as a huge admirer of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, quite familiar with his work, I was resigned to drop dead—figuratively—less than two minutes in. I didn’t bring one of those toilet-shaped sausages people put around their neck on planes only because I find them silly, but I did wear something ostentatiously mistakable for pyjamas. What a pointless display of self-esteem, because Memoria is not just captivating, it is the closest cinema has recently taken me to transcendental meditation.
A good film (whatever it means, I am already regretting having used the expression for how nonsense it sounds to me, but anyway) would probably embrace me, make me live for a time through its characters, empathy, but it would still somehow drive the experience. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s slow-paced enigmatic scenes of staggering beauty, whether set in his native Thailand or the luxuriant Colombian altitudes, seem to force reverse the process by shifting the narrative—for how extraneous many will find the very word, narrative, to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s oeuvre—from the author to the audience, ultimately inviting the latter to drive instead. Like his previous works—but not for this being unoriginal or repetitive in the slightest—Memoria defies any established ideas of entertainment and sublimely defines that of cinematic experience. Really, I can’t imagine it being seen anywhere other than a big screen, in a dark room.