Memoria follows a Scottish orchid farmer, Jessica Holland, as she's visiting Columbia for her ailing sister. She wakes up one night to hear a loud bang. She continues to be afflicted with this strange sensory syndrome that no one else is experiencing, and spends the rest of the film trying to find the origin of this sound. Meanwhile, other strange things are happening around her. Jessica can no longer sleep. The lights seem to go out wherever she is. She is oftentimes corrected on her false memories of the past, her hospitalized sister is suddenly fine, and Hernán, the sound engineer she asks to recreate the bang she experienced, suddenly disappears. Until later in the film, she meets an older man of the same name in the Colombian countryside. This older Hernán has the ability to remember everything, and even experience the memories of others through the vibrations of the objects and environment around him.

Jessica and Hernán synchronized with one another through these audio vibrations. The line between whose memory is whose is blurred, and through this mystical union, Jessica finally discovers the origin of her sound. While not obvious for some viewers, events within the film do not happen in chronological order. Along with Jessica's faulty memory, her miraculously healed sister, and the disappearance of the younger Hernán, who no one else seems to know of, are evidence of Jessica's warped reception of time. We understand later in the film that Jessica can absorb sounds from the past. Jessica isn't going crazy, but is rather unknowingly traveling through time by sensing the collective memory of those around her. As all of us know, when we remember things those memories don't come to us in a strict chronological sequence of events, our memories often branch out, rearrange themselves to make more sense to us on a far more intuitive level. Through Jessica's experience of a collective memory, she exits the strict confines of time.

One of Memoria's defining stylistic features is its use of stillness. The director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, we're set the cool, is often associated with a style of filmmaking called slow cinema. Slow cinema films are often defined by a minimalist style, having little to no narrative and using long contemplative takes. Time and the audience's perception of it often plays a big role in these films. The audience is meant to feel the weight of time. It's inertia through these extended shots where little to nothing happens. This is how Memoria is able to create this sense of stillness. Some shots go on for almost as long as 10 minutes, unmatched by the vast majority of films, even other films in the slow cinema school. One of the most notable scenes in the film is when Jessica asks the older Hernán to sleep. He abides and lays down on the grass right beside her. His eyes are left open, so is his mouth. The color drains from his body. Stray flies circle around him without so much as a flinch from him. When Hernán wakes up, Jessica asks him how it was.

The whole scene of the older Hernán dying and coming back to life last eight minutes. Eight minutes of nothing but a character in stasis. The stasis is a theme throughout the film. Memoria's tagline in here, "Time stops," was used in much of the marketing for the film, it's taken from a scene in which Jessica and the younger Hernán shop for a refrigerator to keep Jessica's orchids. The saleswoman, referring to the cryostatic effects of the fridge, says,

"In here, time stops."

In this film, time does, in fact, stop through its use of stillness and constant subversion of our sense of time. Jessica and Hernán are constantly experiencing the past. Past exists within the future, and vice versa, creating the effect of an all-time singularity in which all things exist at once. Jessica, throughout most of the film, doesn't do much except experience the world around her. She doesn't make a particularly big impact on anyone or anything in her environment. She's a foreigner in a country where she has a loose grasp of the language and doesn't know many people. All she can do is receive the experiences that aren't even her own. Tilda Swinton, even in many interviews, has stated that Jessica isn't so much a character as she is a predicament. When Weerasethakul was doing research for the film, traveling around Columbia, he described it as such:

"While researching, I often heard a loud noise at dawn. It was internal and has occurred in many of the places I visited. This symptom was inseparable from my exposure to Columbia. It has formed the basis of a character whose audio experience synchronizes with the country's memory. I imagine the mountains here as an expression of the people's remembrances through centuries. The mass of Sierras, with their creases and creeks, are like the folds of the brain or the curves of sound waves."

Jessica is nothing but a vehicle for receiving the memories of the world around her. She's a stranger to this world. The only other being she seems to share this solitude with is the older Hernán. As mentioned before the older Hernán can remember everything. His memory is so sharp, in fact, that he hardly ever leaves his home because new experiences are so overwhelming for him. In the scene where Jessica remembers Hernán's memories as if they were her own and hears other sounds from her environment, Hernán says:

"You are reading my memory. I'm like a hard disk. And somehow... you are an antenna."

Jessica receives, and Hernán stores the memories, the history, the traumas, the information of the past. The comparison Hernán makes with himself and Jessica to technology is very interesting. Computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil and his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, posits that there will be a point in time where technology and artificial intelligence will progress to a point far beyond the limits of human cognition. Artificial intelligence will be able to design and improve itself, leading to a period of unprecedented technological growth. In this new world, Kurzweil believes that the boundaries between humans' technology in the virtual world will be so blurred that it changes the very foundations of economy, society, and ethics. 

"Machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity - technological change so rapid and profound, it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and non -biological intelligence, immortal software based humans in ultra -high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light."

Kurzweil's usage of the word singularity to describe the state of our evolution in which we merge with technology is not accidental. The word singularity draws upon the concept in physics, which refers to a point in spacetime where matter is almost inconceivably dense. In a black hole, for instance, the matter is so dense that it creates a gravitational field so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. In here gravity is so powerful that time moves at a rate slower than we can possibly conceive of. In here time stops. For Kurzweil to compare this next stage in our evolution to a point in spacetime where the very laws of physics as we know them break down, is telling of just how transcendent our acquisition of an all-encompassing knowledge can be. If we do not destroy ourselves, we'll reach a point where each of us will be our own hard disks and antennae, and our knowledge of the universe, our collective memories, our history will be so comprehensive that our perception of time will be like nothing we know of today. Our sense of time will compress as our cognitive abilities are enhanced by this technology, which moves at an exponential rate humans might experience eternal moments, or access multiple dimensions of time simultaneously. Human consciousness will operate outside the limits of linear time. At this point, our vision of the past, present and future, will be within our grasp, all in one.

This brings us back to the true origin of Jessica's bang. The older Hernán describes Jessica's sound as one before our time. Jessica walks through the window and sees what she's been hearing this entire time. This bang, which is a calling from the past could just as well be calling toward our future. In here, time is all.