As co-creator of the TV show Westworld, Lisa Joy is well-versed in crafting handsome, twisty, high-concept sci-fi. Reminiscence has a lot of the same qualities as that show, both good and bad. It has moments of creative brilliance, and just as many of frustratingly loose storytelling.
Like Westworld, Reminiscence has a beautifully considered setting. The story takes place at some point in the future, in Miami. Climate change has put the city largely underwater and sent the daytime temperatures rocketing so high that people live their lives at night. It’s a very clever idea for a film noir. Everyone lives in the shadows and the city is artfully crumbling. The stage is set for sin. In this world lives Nick (Hugh Jackman). Nick runs a service that allows people to relive happy memories, from times before the world was awful. His customers are sedated, lie in a techy bath and Nick whispers gently to them while he watches a visual of their memories on a big, fancy projector. If you can remember it, Nick can access it. Assisting him is a warmly cantankerous old friend, Watts (Thandiwe Newton).
The world feels like it has many stories wanting to be discovered. There is so much potential, yet it doesn’t come together.
One night, in walks Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), a lounge singer, all Jessica Rabbit dress and no backstory. Nick falls for her; she disappears; Nick determines to find out what happened to her, with only a few memories as clues. It’s a hoary old noir plot — the grizzled man’s hunt for the dame with secrets — and the addition of the memory gimmick isn’t quite enough to make it feel fresh. It needs more twists on the road to the solution, or for the memory idea to be mined further (it effectively becomes a shortcut interrogation technique). A mystery is made better with a few red herrings to throw us off. Joy gives us just the clues to the solution, so it becomes too easy to piece most of it together before she’s ready to reveal all.
It might have worked better if it took itself a little less seriously. A lot of the dialogue is severely overboiled, but it’s never clear if Joy knows. The film opens with the lines, “The past can haunt a man, that’s what they say. The past is a series of moments, each of them perfect. A bead on the necklace of time.” Now, you can get away with that if it’s presented with a hint of a wink, a suggestion that you’re having fun with the genre, but Joy plays it earnestly. In that context, it just sounds like tin-eared writing.
There’s plenty that’s good here. It’s exceptionally well cast. Few can play a heroic anger like Jackman, and Ferguson has such serious charisma that she gives Mae, more of a concept than a character, needed weight. The world feels like it has many stories wanting to be discovered. There is so much potential, yet it doesn’t come together. A little more attention on the plotting over the sci-fi bells and whistles and this could have been something to remember.
