MEMORIA ****

 Nobody goes to an Apichapong Weerasethakul film for action or excitement unless, of course, they like their excitement to be of the purely cerebral kind. Weerasethakul makes films so slow there are times when you think they've stopped altogether. In "Memoria", his first film largely in English (and Spanish), Tilda Swinton is the woman who hears loud noises in her head, like a heavy object being dropped, and which of us hasn't been awakened from sleep on hearing something similiar? But strange things happen around Tilda, such as car alarms going off for no reason or a man seemingly dying and then coming back to life as he sleeps beside her.

Sounds of every kind play a major part in "Memoria" and naturally where you have sound you must also have silence and from that silence the 'recreation' of sound and therein lies the cerebral excitement of Weerasethakul's most recent feature, the external piecing together of what is happening inside Swinton's head and since we can't physically get inside her head it's left to the actress to convey in her expressions and her movements what she is experiencing, more often than not without the help of dialogue, (this is a film of long silences).

Of course, Weerasethakul's films have always been about the relationship of a character to their environment, emphasised by the amalgamation of sound and vision, "Tropical Malady", being perhaps the most notable example as reality and the purely fantastical merge without explanation and this could be its sister film. Is Swinton simply suffering from a tropical malady or, like Uncle Boonmee, could she be recalling past lives?

In some ways this is Weerasethakul's most accessible film. Always a sublime maker of what we might term 'metaphysical thrillers' but which tend to keep us at a distance here, thanks to Swinton's quietly magnificent performance, he really draws us in. With its allusions to mysticism and danger we are practically in the realms of a suspense movie though certainly not one that will appeal to a mass audience. Weerasethakul will always remain an art-house director and it's in art-houses that this extraordinary film will prosper. See it at all costs.