Memoria (2021) review

Jessica (Tilda Swinton), who is Scottish but living in Columbia - her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke) is sick with an undisclosed ailment in the hospital - keeps hearing this loud noise in her head that's interfering with her ability to function, so she reaches out to audio engineer Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) to help replicate the sound, which she describes as a "big ball of concrete" that "falls into a metal well" and is "surrounded by seawater."  Anyone familiar with Weerasethakul's past work should find much to relish in this purposely cryptic feature: his ability to control a scene is still very impressive - I'm thinking mostly of the part with Jessica and the man cleaning fish where she tells him to go to sleep ... and he does - and he certainly challenges the audience's patience with some protracted moments and seemingly "disconnected" bits (Swinton looks at special refrigerators that extend the life of flowers, work is being done on a tunnel in the Amazon, etc.).  It rides on this wave of Jungian psychology - specifically the "collective unconscious" - so when it introduces an explanation for Jessica's "auditory hallucination," it's debatable whether or not it's a cop-out or just a larger part of Joe's theory that we're all connected to something bigger than us and beyond our comprehension.  Either way, it's completely beautiful and idiosyncratic: we'd expect nothing less.