Til­da Swin­ton goes on a sen­so­ry jour­ney in the first Memo­ria trailer

In just a few short days Memo­ria will pre­mière at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, sig­nalling the grand return of for­mer Palme d’Or win­ner Apichat­pong Weerasethakul to the offi­cial sec­tion. Though dis­trib­u­tor NEON has yet to set a release date, they’ve been good enough to air the trail­er online this morn­ing, promis­ing more of the direc­tor known as Joe’s inim­itable brand of slow cinema.

His lat­est work marks his first for­ay into Eng­lish-lan­guage film­mak­ing, as he shifts focus from his native Thai­land to the jun­gles of Colom­bia (which may be the region of the world that looks the most like the one he left behind). There, a Scot­tish expat por­trayed by Til­da Swin­ton pur­sues a life of tran­quil­i­ty and sim­plic­i­ty, but an exter­nal force soon intrudes on her inner peace.

One morn­ing, she hears a noise of mys­te­ri­ous ori­gin (“like a rum­ble from the core of the Earth”) and can’t get it out of her mind. The film fol­lows her effort to dis­cern the source of the enig­mat­ic sound, an exis­ten­tial wan­der tak­ing her through a record­ing stu­dio for some tin­ker­ing with audio and a hut tucked away in the wilderness.

Those famil­iar with Weerasethakul’s style know what to expect: long takes in wide shots, min­i­mal dia­logue and move­ment for max­i­mum med­i­ta­tive still­ness. He appears to con­tin­ue his pur­suit of his pet themes here as well, focus­ing on the thin mem­brane sep­a­rat­ing the nat­ur­al and man­made worlds from one another.

Hope­ful­ly, NEON will get this one out before the year’s up, with the encour­age­ment of a rap­tur­ous recep­tion undoubt­ed­ly soon to come. Weerasethakul’s films make for per­fect post-lock­down back-to-the-movies selec­tions, the care­ful­ly con­struct­ed land­scape of sound best savored through audi­to­ri­um amplifiers.