Memoria

"Incredibly provocative and quietly powerful."

— Gary M. Kramer, Salon.com

"It’s a beautiful work of cinematic concentration that’s purely Apichatpong."

— Chandler Levack, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

"Memoria is a sensory explosion, and its dense, immersive shrapnel isn’t easily removable."

— Polygon, Robert Daniels

"Every scene unfolds with quiet, meticulous clarity, but Weerasethakul’s luminous precision only deepens the mystery."

— A.O. Scott, The New York Times

"Memoria is a hypnotic, unquantifiable, occasionally inpenetrable sonic odyssey from a unique cinematic voice."

— Jake Cunningham, Empire Magazine

"Memoria is more meditation than movie, a transfixing deep-dive into the profound challenges of relating to people and places from the outside in."

— Eric Kohn, IndieWire

"Watching this film reminded me of when I was 17, hearing Revolution 9 on The White Album for the first time. It left a residue of happiness in my heart."

— Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

"Weerasethakul is unpacking a sensation everyone has probably experienced at one point in their life: the feeling that something is cosmically out of whack."

— David Sims, The Atlantic

"Not since Todd Haynes' Safe has a murkily understood, possibly psychosomatic ailment been reconceived in so haunting and unforgettable a fashion."

— Mike D'Angelo, AV Club

"Weeraskathul also explores how identities emerge, dissolve, and connect but he steps onto that shifting ground of memory and experience through a poetic, reverent portal."

— Liam Lacey, Original-Cin

"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."

— Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

"Like the best of the director’s work, Memoria lulls you into its rhythms, gives you the sparse outlines of an intellectual framework, then hits you with the full weight of accumulated lyricism that must be pure cinema."

— Mark Asch, Little White Lies

"[Apichatpong’s] films are well-thought-out experiences, unique, disciplined, gorgeously composed and irascibly moving to their own rhythm. What sets Memoria apart from his other work is a new setting: Colombia."

— G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle

"Sound designer Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr’s compositions are as dramatically impactful as Tilda Swinton’s performance is delicately minimalist. Her carefully calibrated movements sit beautifully within the director’s enigmatic images and hypnotic pacing."

— Tara Brady, The Irish Times

"Graced by Tilda Swinton’s emptied-out performance as a woman haunted by a strange sound whose origins she is obsessed with uncovering, Memoria eludes easy categorisation while becoming a powerful meditation on connection, spiritual isolation and renewal."

— Tim Grierson, Screen Daily

"Beneath this straightforward (if enigmatic) premise, there is a gradual slippage, as if the plate tectonics of Weerasethakul’s seemingly solid medical/mental mystery were subtly rearranging themselves, like puzzle pieces shifted by an unseen hand. As they lose their narrative mooring, the various parts of the whole have the effect of rearranging your own consciousness, in a way that leaves your perceptions feeling profoundly altered, perhaps permanently."

— Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post