REVIEW: Reminiscence

I'm writing this review already aware that this film has been pronounced dead on the box office scene. Alas, such is the fate for many a midbudget film, even before a global shutdown. Can I understand why this particular player in that game didn't break the barrier? Perhaps a little. Lisa Joy's new film, Reminiscence, sometimes trips over its own plotline. But despite that, the film swims in cynicism and grace in a way that shows and reveals a depth most elusive in the modern cinema scene. Perhaps we've written it off too soon.

The film is best described as Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo set in a near but bleak future. Climate change has flooded the streets of Miami, and now that Orlando is underwater, people dive into their own memories for entertainment. This process is enabled through advanced technology and mental technicians like Nick (Hugh Jackman). One day an alluring bar singer named Mae (Rebecca Fergusson) enlists the help of Nick and draws him into a romance that feels too vivid for a world teetering on the apocalypse.

Nick thinks he has found his island in the storm until Mae vanishes without warning. The slightest inquiry into her disappearance unearths disquieting truths about who she was. Nick's only clue lies in the memories he has of her, and he can only swim in the transient recollections of a woman that he never really knew for so long before he starts drowning.

The nostalgic yearnings of this film recall old noir films of the 1940s, but with a sci-fi dressing. Some of the plotlines in this mystery are admittedly more interesting than others. The love affair between Nick and Mae supposedly overlaps with another plotline about corrupt politicians and policemen, but even now I'm having difficulty remembering all the threads in that tangle. When the story does come together and you find out what the film was wanting to say all along, it approaches something like profundity. For that, I can't fault the film too much, no matter how uninterested I was in the drug underworld of a post-Disney World Florida.

The film could have made a comment on the bleak outlook of the world without setting this story in a fallen future, but then we wouldn't have had some of the most interesting visuals ever seen in a mystery-thriller. Dystopia has never looked so serene. You don't see this kind of mid-budget design work in theaters anymore. It's always exploding spaceships or nothing.

Jackman spends most of the film mixing anger and sadness in varying values. I wouldn't call this the highlight of his career, but his cynicism and hope interact in a way that keeps the viewer searching.

Jackman's billing will no doubt unfortunately drown some of the other notable performances within this film. These include Thandiwe Newton's Emily--Nick's coworker, anchor, and almost friend--and Cliff Curtis' Booth--the corrupt officer enacting the spiraling plot in which Mae is entangled.

Mae herself is more of an idea than a character for most of her screentime, a sultry ghost for Nick to pine over, though Fergusson's performance does deepen as the veils fall and the woman behind the phantom comes into focus.

If the mystery does work, it works mostly by keeping certain plot features and characters undefined until the last minute. The tension comes less from reversals and red herrings than it does from keeping the magician's cloak over the mystery box for as long as possible. In that way, the film denies the viewer some of the best pleasures of the mystery film.

But at the same time, the mystery element is just draping over an entirely different story. The movie is psychological in other ways. At its heart, this is the story of a man learning about how to relate to his own conceptions of perfection and beauty in a world that is overflowing with disappointment. The film stops just short of saying something truly profound about the beautiful overlaps between loss, happiness, illusion, and memory, but when you spend so long in this film's conversation, you start to hear what you know to be true anyways.

These kinds of midbudget, non-franchise, adult-minded films are themselves like illusory phantoms that appear and disappear as though they were pawns in a larger scheme out of our control. When you chase their shadows, you find their faults and contradictions, but the search unearths pools of beautiful truth just the same.

--The Professor

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