Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Elkin Diaz, Agnes Brekke, Juan Pablo Urrego, Daniel Gimenez Cacho, Jeanne Balibar
Distributor: Madman Entertainment
Runtime: 136 mins. Reviewed in Apr 2022
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan

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Rating notes: Mild themes and infrequent coarse language

This drama-fantasy film mixes the natural and supernatural together to deliver a richly meditative movie about a woman haunted by strange sounds while visiting her sister in Bogotá, Colombia.

This is a multinational, part English-speaking, film that explores the human mind and memory in contemplative, meditative fashion. Jessica Holland (Swinton) is a Scottish woman who lives in the Spanish municipality of Medellin and runs a gardening business there as a botanist, selling flowers. While visiting her sick sister, Karen (Brekke) in Bogotá, Colombia, she is awakened in the middle of the night by strange sounds. She wonders what is happening, and what the sounds mean.

The film shared the Jury Prize at the 74th Cannes Film Festival in 2021. It was voted ‘Film of the Year’ in 2021 by the London Film Critics Circle, and was Colombia’s Oscar-entry for best International Feature Film of 2021. Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul was the winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010 for his fantasy film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Jessica is haunted by the sounds she experiences as she travels through Colombia, and she becomes obsessed with trying to uncover their meaning. The sounds are phantom bangs that only she can hear. They explode like sonic booms, and seem to materialise out of nowhere. They cause sleeplessness, and promote feelings of complete isolation from those around her, and they unexpectedly occur at moments, that have particular emotional meaning to her.

The film itself becomes a sound and visual odyssey, uniquely directed by Weerasethakul. It is a hypnotic work that is almost impossible to categorise. Its pacing is slow, but builds to a remarkable, surreal conclusion. Jessica is preoccupied with the question of what the sounds mean, and the viewer becomes immersed in the same. The husband of Jessica’s sister puts her in touch with a sound engineer (Urrego), but he cannot solve the problem for her (and he suddenly can’t be found again), and even a peasant (Diaz), who lives in the jungle, cannot create or interpret the sound’s distinctive rhythms. Together, however, Jessica and the peasant share deeply stirred memories that have occurred for them over time. The film forces examination of memories deep within personal consciousness.

Swinton carefully calibrates movements and speech to highlight the enigmatic effect of the director’s intent. In character and impact, she reinforces human detachment that highlights the nature of spiritual connection and meditation. Jessica never fathoms the secrets of the sounds, but the film leaves the viewer motivated to search for the answers to them. Swinton’s acting projects a minimalist performance that harmonises with the enigmas of the plot. Her acting focuses on the question: ‘Is Jessica’s reality shared, or does it exist just for her?. The viewer never knows who, or what, is a figment of Jessica’s fertile imagination, but is highly motivated to try to answer that question.

This is an atmospheric arthouse movie that creatively investigates the complex nature of sensory reality and human isolation. The film idiosyncratically captures the nature of loneliness, as when Jessica doesn’t know how to react to a sonic boom that nobody around her is able to hear. This is a beautiful meditative film, sparsely scripted, and there is little action to distract the viewer from the contemplative challenge of trying to interpret the nature of Jessica’s personal experience.

This film is almost a sensory experience in itself. It is the lyricism lying at the core of this film, that probably best provides the answers to the complex issues posed by this deeply introspective film.