Memoria

 Memoria is a befuddling surrealist jaunt from Thai writer/director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, set in Colombia, shot in English and Spanish. If you don't tune into its extremely relaxed wavelength, it's a rough one to endure.

 Jessica (Tilda Swinton) is awakened from sleep one night by a loud, booming noise, one that only she can apparently hear. Eventually it gets frequent enough that it doesn't let her sleep.
 That's not the only weirdness that starts following her around: incidents include car alarms going off and electric lights flickering in her vicinity, or an instance of her remembering someone as dead that everyone else assures her is perfectly fine.

 Jessica takes it in stride. She's concerned, obviously, and tries to investigate a little, aided by people she meets and befriends on the way (an anthropologist played by Jeanne Balibar and a sound engineer by Juan Pablo Urrego). Mostly, the movie is content with drifting from scene to extended scene, many of them seemingly extraneous, eventually moving from Bogotá to the wooded hills where she finds another friendly stranger (Elkin Díaz) who shows her how malleable the line between death and sleep can be, and later some memory-related strangeness. Don't expect anything to make proper, lucid sense - especially the explanation for the noises that kicked off the story; Dream-logic and poetic association rule here.

 It's a very well-crafted film. Weerasethakul has a knack for finding gorgeous, interesting-looking imagery (cinematographer: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom), many of the film's digressions are enthralling, the sound design is stellar and the central mystery - even when it's clear it's not going to have a traditionally satisfying resolution - is interesting.
 I found I soon lost my patience with it, though. It's a slow, slow movie, one that holds its mostly static shots for a very long time and pads its two-hour-plus run time with seemingly filler scenes. And while beautifully shot, there's almost no... I don't know, flaming football game or folk tales about hairy jungle spirits, no overt weirdness, just the sense that something is slightly off; That's obviously the intent here, but if you're not fully under the film's spell there's very little to hold on to.

 Memoria is too interesting to dismiss - there's plenty of interesting sequences or intriguing snippets of meaning - and the central performance by Swinton is great, even when she's forced to speak in (excellent, but heavily accented) Spanish. To be honest, I almost found it too much of a chore to get through, and I still can't say whether I actually liked it - but I am glad I stuck with it.