Film

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

“IN THIS town, there are a lot of people who have hallucinations,” a doctor tells Jessica (Tilda Swinton) at the beginning of Memoria. Then, in a neat encapsulation of the mix of the mystical and the medicinal that runs throughout this strange and heady film, she prescribes the tranquilliser Xanax while advising her patient not to take it in case it inhibits her ability to savour the beauty of the world.

Jessica is a British botanist in Colombia who wakes one night to a heavy thumping noise that is loud enough to set off car alarms. When it becomes apparent that no one else heard it, it sends her on a downwards spiral into anxiety. She can find no obvious source and continues to hear the noise regularly, while no one else can. Jessica travels from city to jungle to try to work out what it all means, getting caught up in deep and sometimes disturbing questions about the nature of reality.

The film-maker himself, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, had exploding head syndrome – a rare sleep disorder in which people are woken by the sensation of an (imagined) loud noise. Yet while his experience of this strange and unexplained condition was part of the inspiration for the story, Memoria is defiantly unempirical, more interested in how something might feel than what might have caused it.

As she investigates the strange noise, Jessica meets and befriends Agnes, an anthropologist who is examining a newly unearthed thousand-year-old skeleton of a young girl with a hole in her skull: probably “a ritual” to release evil spirits, the scientist reasons.

She also meets a sound engineer called Hernàn, who tries to replicate the sound inside her head with a catalogue of absurd cinema sound effects like “stomach hit wearing hoodie”, while Jessica explains that it is more like “a ball of concrete hitting a metal wall surrounded by seawater” and “a rumble from the core of the Earth”.

Hernàn puts the sound that comes closest to music with his band, and Jessica listens to it with headphones on and a wry smile. The audience cannot hear the music and it is a typically oblique move from Weerasethakul, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2010 for the equally enthralling Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Memoria is Weerasethakul’s first film set outside his home nation of Thailand, and it is essentially a meditation on interconnectedness. What does the past mean to modern life? Do we carry the memory of it, and of each other, with us somehow? And when things get weird, what should we pathologise and fix and when should we just try to understand ourselves better?

“What should we pathologise and fix and when should we just try to understand ourselves better?”

In doing this, Memoria isn’t didactic. Weerasethakul is asking questions, not answering them, and he seems to be aware of how lofty and pretentious it may all appear. Jessica laughs when she hears that Hernàn’s band is called The Depth of Delusion Ensemble, welcome levity that creates an unusual tone, feeling at once preternatural and realistic.

Memoria pushes people away before pulling them close. Swinton appears frail, nervy but curious. She talks carefully, urgently to HernĂ n (whom later she discovers no one else has heard of), to her sister, to Agnes, but the camera always stays far away and static, shots so long, calm and still that the film envelops you instead of talking at you like most do.

It is a considered exercise in empathy and patience, a commitment between the camera and its audience as much as between people and generations. In its second half, Jessica visits an anthropological dig at Bogotá and there she meets a different Hernàn, a man who claims to remember everything. “I try to limit what I see,” he says, “experiences are harmful.”

As Jessica and the new HernĂ n commune over coffee and pastoral meditations on life and death, memory becomes a fluid thing, a shared thing, as if we are all part of some collective experience. It is surreal and moving.

An abrupt change of direction in the finale feels like quite a U-turn and won’t be to everybody’s tastes, but overall Memoria is measured and deeply felt. This is slow cinema to see on a big screen and get lost in.

No Time To Die is in UK and international cinemas from 30 September and in the US from 8 October.

Time is definitely not a healer in Old, the latest film from writer, director and producer M. Night Shyamalan, where the bodies of stranded tourists hurtle towards old age at an accelerated rate due to a local geological quirk.

This fascinating (and, typically for Shyamalan, high-concept) premise raises all sorts of thorny questions. What is important to us when time is short? What can time teach us – Ìęand what can it steal from us? Can ageing prosthetics ever be applied convincingly?

Shyamalan, the film-maker behind supernatural thrillers including The Sixth Sense and The Village, has become as famous for the disappointing execution of excellent premises as he is for dreaming them up in the first place.

Old, based loosely on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar LĂ©vyÌęandÌęFrederik Peeters, starts out as one of Shyamalan’s best efforts in years. It begins with such creepy camera angles and creepy casting that the slow pacing for which he is sometimes lambasted works perfectly.

Dread rises from the outset. Guy (Gael GarcĂ­a Bernal)Ìęand Prisca (Vicky Krieps) have brought their children, 6-year-old Trent (Nolan River) and 11-year-old Maddox (Alexa Swinton), to an idyllic resort that Prisca pointedly reminds us she found randomly on the internet.

The dialogue is a little excessive. “You’re always thinking about the future. It makes me feel not seen!” yells Prisca. “You’re always thinking about the past. You work in a goddamn museum,” retorts Guy.

But if the script feels clunky, the production doesn’t. The family swan around their lush hotel room, as the cameraÌęspies them menacingly from outside like a predator. Trent has a habit of asking random hotel guests what they do for a living, but the way the camera pans across his subjects’ faces makes the exchange feel unsettling rather than adorable, as if we’re being introduced to an ensemble soon to be picked off.

A special day at an idyllic, private beach is arranged by the over-eager hotel manager. At the cove, hemmed in by rocks and swiftly abandoned by their shifty driver (Shyamalan himself, in the kind of cameo role beloved of Alfred Hitchcock), they find themselves stranded with a cast of characters worthy of an Agatha Christie murder mystery.

There is a doctor (Rufus Sewell, on fabulously sinister form), his trophy wife (Abbey Lee), their young daughter (Mikaya Fisher) and his mother (Kathleen Chalfant). Then there is psychologist Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird), who has epilepsy, her nurse-husband (Ken Leung) and a rapper (Aaron Pierre) whose partner washes up dead (and naked) the moment they arrive, heralding an onset of strange and increasingly grotesque symptoms.

Swimsuits become too tight. Patricia’s seizures disappear. A tumour balloons in minutes and must be cut out right there on the beach. A pregnancy is delivered moments after it begins.

There is no doubting Shyamalan’s talent for suspense. In the film’s first half, he labours lovingly over one shot where characters age years as the camera pans across the beach. In other scenes, it perches just behind children’s heads so we can observe their parents’ alarmed expressions without knowing precisely what is so shocking. Like a Stephen King novel, the horror here is not in the revelation but the build-up.

Sadly, Old is a stylistic triumph but a narrative dud. The second half of the film is severely hampered by too many undercooked ideas and a plot too intent on explaining itself. All those questions about what value we put on time – or ought toÌę– are skirted over too fast. Philosophical enquiry makes way for a signature Shyamalan plot twist, which, in the end, feels perfunctory and unsurprising.

The film quickly loses its grip when it asks us to emotionally invest in characters even as it dispatches them one by one, collapsing in the process from a sinister body horror into a confused (sand)castle in the air.

is in UK and US cinemas now

Simon Stone

Available on Netflix

BASIL BROWN, played in The Dig by Ralph Fiennes, was the principal archaeologist behind the 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England. It is now considered one of the most important finds in Britain, the majesty of its 27-metre burial ship and 7th-century Anglo-Saxon treasures reframing historians’ view of the so-called Dark Ages.

However, it was very nearly missed – and Brown wasn’t always acknowledged for his efforts. He was a self-educated archaeologist and astronomer, who spent much of his income as a tenant farmer and insurance agent on that education. Being an independent scholar without an academic post was an irregularity that led to the omission of his name at the British Museum’s display of the Sutton Hoo treasures for decades.

The Dig, based on the novel of the same name by John Preston, rights that wrong. It is directed by Simon Stone with a distinctly British tone of restraint worthy of film producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, who made the 1990s hits Howards End and The Remains of the Day.

The film approaches English passions cautiously, shining a light on Brown’s incredible contribution, as well as that of Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan), the landowner who hired Brown to dig under the mounds on her estate because she had a “feeling” they would find something of note.

Fiennes and Mulligan are flawless as the excavators that the professionals underestimate, imbuing their characters with an intelligent zeal for the field that isn’t dampened by their places in society: he’s a lowly contractor for the Ipswich Museum, she’s a wealthy widowed landowner who went to finishing school. They share a quiet determination and mutual respect, initially arguing over which of the 18 mounds to tackle first, but finding common ground in the soil and its secrets. “That’s life what’s revealed,” Brown says in a thick Suffolk accent. “And that’s why we dig.”

Brown forms a friendship with Pretty’s young son Robert, a keen amateur archaeologist. It is all the more affecting as we learn that Pretty is dying so Robert will soon be an orphan (Pretty died in 1942).

“The Dig is obsessed with class boundaries. It fizzes with curbed passions amid honey-coloured fields”

This is a film of two halves, the first about archaeology, the second concerned with the personal lives of the people behind the dig. The first half is more successful, illustrating the patience necessary for excavation, especially in England where it is always raining, exposing fragile finds to the elements. It also reveals the dangers. In one of their earliest conversations, Pretty rescues Brown when the earth falls in on him and he claws desperately at the dirt. It is a good illustration of the risks an ordinary man took to exhume historical artefacts, only to be cast aside later.

Like Howards End and The Remains of the Day, The Dig is obsessed with class boundaries. It fizzes with curbed passions amid the honey-coloured English fields, the indomitable march of time making each ordinary moment both horribly transient, as the second world war calls up young men to die in the background, and simultaneously everlasting.

History is made of such things, and forgotten items – like Anglo-Saxon gold and Brown himself – can be retrieved.

In the second half, we learn more about other characters on the dig, including supercilious chauvinist Charles Phillips (Ken Stott) who arrives from the British Museum to oversee things. Then there are archaeologists Stuart Piggott (Ben Chaplin) and his wife Peggy Piggott (Lily James), whose strained marriage disintegrates before our eyes as Peggy forms an attachment with good-looking photographer Rory (Johnny Flynn).

The acting is impeccable, particularly from James, but the romance and domestic crises feel a little heavy-handed in a film that is otherwise so self-possessed. The Dig doesn’t need such frills. Like Sutton Hoo, the treasures aren’t showily arranged but lie quietly, in the silences between people, and in simple shared hopes that stretch across generations.

“The movie is beautifully framed, packed with long landscape shots bursting with colour”

The best films and TV

There is a lot to look forward to this year, and some may even be available as scheduled.

The release of , but perhaps this will fuel anticipation. The dystopian horror, starring Emily Blunt and written/directed by her husband John Krasinski, is now due for release in April 2021. The Abbott family live in an apocalyptic landscape plagued by monsters that hunt by sound, and they are about to discover there are other dangers out there too.

, stars Tom Hanks as the ailing creator of a robot intended to care for his beloved dog after he dies, in an American Midwest destroyed by a cataclysmic solar event.

It isn’t all sci-fi dystopias. Tom Cruise will be defying the laws of physics in a long-awaited sequel to the 1986 classic. It is set for release in July.

A few months later, in October, Denis Villeneuve’s much anticipated is due out.

Come December, , starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as astronomers trying to warn the world about a giant meteorite heading towards Earth as a fumbling president downplays the dangers. It is being filmed in socially distanced conditions in Boston, and the cast includes Timothée Chalamet, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep and Jonah Hill.

Also out in December is a new film from La La Land director Damien Chazelle. It takes a fresh look at how cinematic technologies have changed, examining the transition from the silent movie era to the talkies.

On the small screen, there is a smattering of prestige reruns of David Attenborough’s series, plus other nature/climate change documentaries, including , about climate change activist Greta Thunberg. This had a brief cinema release but will air on the BBC in January.

a new documentary from Sky (release date not yet available) aims to shed new light on the life of the late physicist through previously unseen private family archives.

Francesca Steele is a film and TV critic based in London

Ammonite, a new film about fossil hunterÌęMary AnningÌęfrom Francis Lee (the director of 2017’s much-praised God’s Own Country), is unhurried in a way that won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But then again, neither was the fieldwork essential to the burgeoning science of palaeontology in the 19^th century.

Fossil collection can be a slow and sometimes boring business, which is presumably why so many men of learning left Anning – poor, working class, self-educated – to do much of the work involved in excavation, then took all the credit when the items were displayed in London museums.

The film’s openingÌęis also a little slow at times, but it is right to pay heed to the labour-intensive nature of this vital work. We meet Anning (Kate Winslet) as she scales the cliffs at Lyme Regis in Dorset, UK. Her skirts are tucked between her legs and a harsh wind whistles by as she tugs at rocks lodged deep within the clay, often tumbling down the slope before she has secured anything worthwhile. It is hard, solitary graft.

Back in her studio, she brushesÌęammonites and other small fossils for tourists to buy. The 5-metreÌęichthyosaur skeletonÌęshe famously unearthed aged just 12 has already been transported far away to the capital, its bones under glass, bearing someone else’s name. Unlike many of her peers, Anning must earn a living, and because of her class and sex, she doesn’t have access to the scientific societies that would elevate her position.

She lives alone with her crotchety mother in a tiny, freezing cottage. Their life is quiet, although crashing waves and harsh winds roar around her on the beach and creep in the window cracks –ÌęAmmonite’s sound design is one of its finest features.

Into one of these quiet days come Mr and Mrs Murchison. Roderick Murchison (James McArdle) is a geologist –in real life, he first identified the geological time period known as the Silurian system – who wishes to learn from Anning. His wife Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan) is suffering from “mild melancholia”, which seems to have been brought on by childlessness.

In reality, Charlotte was indeed friends with Anning, but was also a lively geologistÌęand was in some ways responsible for her husband’s successes. Here, she is a fragile creature, lonely in her marriage. We see her reaching for a husband who tells her he misses his “fun” wife, before leaving her in Lyme Regis to recuperate as he goes off on his European tour, paying the Annings to watch over her.

Ronan and Winslet do some nuanced, career-best work here. Trussed up in their Victorian petticoats and cumbersome bonnets, the dialogue often painfully sparse, they must act predominantly with their faces. It would have been easy to overplay everything as a result, but instead it is their reserve that moves us – a discreet look of curiosity here, a secret smile there.

Winslet’s transformation from gruff loner to passionate lover is particularly fine. Initially unhappy at being lumbered with a frail gentlewoman, their friendship takes her by surprise. She has convinced herself she needs isolation, even enjoys it, when in reality she has had no choice. Women at this time either had to be owned or alone. This a story about Victorian misogyny and female friendship more than it is about Anning herself.

From here, the film departs radically from fact. After Anning nurses her new friend back to health following a fever, the two find comfort in each other’s bodies. The sex scenes are incredibly beautiful, delicately acted and shot with the focus on the power of touch rather than gratification. The film really comes to life in these moments, after a laboured start that might well represent quotidian reality but that may initially put some audiences off.

However, it isn’t so much the film’s pace or infidelity to fact that are most likely to disappoint, but rather the scant attention it pays to Anning’s actual achievements. Anya Pearson, a trustee of Mary Anning Rocks, a charity campaigning for a statue of AnningÌęto be built in Lyme Regis, praises the portrayal of the “horrendous slog of fieldwork” but says of the film: “I do think it uses Anning as a vessel. It could have been any two women in this romance. There’s actually very little palaeontology.”

Anning was born in 1799 in Lyme Regis. Her father, a carpenter, supplemented his income by collecting “curios” from the local cliffs and taught his daughter to do the same. As well as her childhood discovery of an ichthyosaur, she also found the first complete plesiosaur in her twenties. Although today she is sometimes credited with finding dinosaurs, the fossils Anning discovered on the Jurassic Coast were all marine reptiles, a separate prehistoric species.

Paul Barrett at the Natural History Museum in London says: “Mary was an extraordinary fossil collector, who found hundreds of scientifically important fossils in what was to become a boom time in palaeontology, when it moved from being a hobby for people collecting ‘natural curiosities’ to a science. Relatively little was known about fossils before this. They were usually given supernatural explanations.”

Anning’s work helped form a bedrock for Darwin’s. “Anning saw these creatures and realised they couldn’t possibly have lived within the time frame that the Bible suggested for existence,” says Tori Herridge, paleontologist and co-founder of TrowelBlazers, a website that celebrates the forgotten stories of women in geology, palaeontology and archeology. “She found belemnites, a prehistoric kind of squid, and noticed how closely their ink sacs resembled that of the modern squid, indicating that one might have evolved from the other. She was a talented analyst with a good eye for anatomy as well as fieldwork.”

“Anning was not a lone pioneer – many of her male and female contemporaries also contributed heavily to these changing ideas of how the world evolved. But in a funny sort of way, Anning was the only professional because she was actually earning a living. Many of her counterparts did this more as a genteel hobby,” she says.

It is a myth that Anning was a loner or underrated within her lifetime, says Herridge. “In some ways, her achievement is the very fact that she was acknowledged at the time, given cultural constraints.” In 1838, after Anning found herself destitute following a bad investment, the Geological Society (which didn’t accept women as members and had previously excluded Anning from a meeting about her own plesiosaur discovery) actually granted her an annual annuity – a sort of pension, illustrating the high regard in which she was held.

She had plenty of friends too. Charlotte Murchison seems unlikely to have been her lover (and was actually older, not younger, as suggested in Ammonite), but the two did exchange many letters over the years. Indeed, many of Anning’s friends were the wives of the men who came to consult her – Mary Buckland, for example, wife of the president of the Geological Society, William Buckland.

Numerous letters between Anning and Murchison, Buckland and Frances Bell, a teenager to whom Anning taught fossil hunting and on whom her AmmoniteÌęlover was originally thought to have been based, can be read at the Natural History Museum and elsewhere. Contemporaries described Anning as “shrewd”, “a strong, energetic spinster” and “rather satirical”. The antisocial person portrayed by Winslet seems a long way from the vivacious character who appears intermittently in her friends’ descriptions.

“I think what’s quite interesting about Anning is that she writes rarely about herself, and much more about her work,” says Herridge. “It’s her friends who relay stories of her good sense of humour and so on. And because of that, there’s quite a gap between what we really know and what we have to guess at, which means we can all imagine Anning, to a certain extent, however we choose.”

Ammonite is released in the US on 13 November. The UK release date has yet to be announced. It played at the London Film Festival in October.

Film

Directed by Todd Haynes

UK cinemas, 28 February

“WHAT would happen if you drank it?” asks lawyer Robert Bilott in the movie Dark Waters, about an unregulated chemical he has found listed in documents belonging to one of the highest profile chemical companies in the US. “That’s like saying, ‘What if you swallowed a tyre?'” chuckles the scientist he is asking, as if no one would ever consume it.

Except people have. In this dramatised version of a true story, it is 1998. Bilott (played by Mark Ruffalo) is a partner at a law firm in Cincinnati, Ohio, known for defending chemical companies. A West Virginia farmer, who lives in the same small town as Bilott’s grandmother, asks him for help.

DuPont, the behemoth behind Teflon, bought some of the farm’s land years ago so it could create a landfill site for chemical waste from its nearby factory. Since then, says the farmer, nearly 200 cows have died. No one in Parkersburg will help. They are all afraid of DuPont.

At first, Bilott declines. Then he sees the depleted grasslands, the lake covered in a putrid scum, a raving, tumour-ridden cow, and he files a small lawsuit on behalf of the farmer, and gains access to DuPont’s files. And, as he recalls the black teeth of a child riding her bike in Parkersburg, he realises with horror that residents have also been affected.

The lawsuit gradually grows into a class action. Bilott loses money and his health, and nearly his family and job. Ruffalo plays Bilott with calm bewilderment: dogged, aghast, egoless.

The New York Times article on which Dark Waters is based called Bilott “the lawyer who became DuPont’s worst nightmare”. Even though he is a successful lawyer, when it comes to chemistry he is a self-confessed dunce.

This is useful, because it allows a scientist to explain to Bilott the complex chemical compound used that drives the plot in a way we can all understand. Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), also known as C8, was used in Teflon and found everywhere from non-stick frying pans to carpets. It is a “forever chemical”, a substance that stays in the environment, well, forever.

“The chemical is phased out in most Western manufacturing, but it is still present in 99 per cent of life on Earth”

Director Todd Haynes, who directed delicate love story Carol, starring Cate Blanchett, deploys discretion here, too. Dark Waters may market itself as a legal thriller, but it is uninterested in sensationalism, almost obtusely so. Blink and you can miss crucial evidence. Bilott pores over piles of obfuscating papers and witness statements as the horrors stack up.

DuPont documents point to some degree of knowledge about C8’s toxicity. The firm removed pregnant women from factory work after babies were born deformed. It did tests on rats who got cancer. Yet it didn’t stop using the chemical.

The film is measured, without gotcha moments. One scene in which Bilott chats to his wife, played by Anne Hathaway, is filmed to show only the back of her head throughout, as if to insist that she isn’t the point. Bilott is the point. The hard work is the point.

The realism can feel hard going. This is a less sexy film than, say, Erin Brockovich, even though they share plot similarities. But realism allows the film’s power to grow slowly, like the case, frustrating our hopes and increasing its final impact. It was 1998 when Bilott began. It was 2017 when DuPont finally settled what had become more than 3550 personal injury claims, for $671 million, but denied any wrongdoing.

Real-life implications of this David and Goliath case continue to emerge: the US environmental watchdog recently reported that levels of contamination in US drinking water are far higher than previously thought, and PFOA, although phased out in most Western manufacturing, remains present in 99 per cent of life on Earth. This film is a must-watch. Non-stick frying pans will never look the same again.