Memories in the genre of science fiction films have always been a tricky thing. The idea, for example, that foreign powers can plant things in one’s memory that one then accepts as one’s own past – the famous stories of Philip K. Dick deal with this abyss of loss of identity. They have already worked disturbingly well in the cinema, for example in the film adaptations of Paul Verhoeven (“Total Recall”) or Ridley Scott (“Blade Runner”).
The thriller “Reminiscence”, the self-written feature film debut of the author Lisa Joy, blatantly ties in with these predecessors. In the first shot, for example, the camera hovers in the twilight towards a pathetically dilapidated metropolis of the future that is already half-flooded by the sea. Blade Runner starts out very similarly, only without the sea, but this time we’re in Miami instead of Los Angeles. And not quite so far in the future: Although climate change has made the world so hot that no one can work during the day, there are still no flying cars and human-like replicants here. Nobody has even invented fake memories.
Instead, the tracking shot ends with a hypnotist who has made real memories his business: Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) runs a somewhat shabby studio in which you can immerse yourself in your own past, literally. You step into a kind of water tank in which the brain waves are tapped, go into a trance and then let Nick’s voice lead you to a moment from the past that you want to relive – so sensual and tactile and real that you become addicted to it can be.
This is to some extent possible without a water tank; there are hypnotherapists who offer such regression journeys, for example to track down trauma from childhood. The future fantasy here is that Nick’s machine will also make the images from the brains of his customers visible, in high resolution and even almost accessible, as a kind of hologram in the room. Nick and his loyal assistant Emily (Thandiwe Newton) can always see exactly what the people in their water tank are thinking about, as if they were invisible like ghosts.
This is interesting as a cinematic idea because the cinema itself is a kind of trance room and every film that also enters the protagonists’ head cinema causes confusion at some point: Which brain are we in right now? The idea of the hologram makes it possible to separate the worlds, but the absolute visibility also makes things uncomfortable – after all, many memories have to do with nudity and sex. So that Nick doesn’t appear as a voyeur, his creator gives him a code of honor: As soon as a woman appears naked in the hologram, he demonstratively turns away.
The woman who appears at Nick’s is a film noir character with a thousand role models
This happens, for example, when the nightclub singer Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) comes to him as a customer. She doesn’t want to go far back, just to the day before, wants to know where she has misplaced her key ring. A zero job, but Nick falls in love with her, the two become a couple and spend an apparently magical time together, which one does not see. That shows a bit of the problem with the film: a narrative that is so fixated on the past has to leave out the present. This is probably one of the reasons why “Reminiscence” flopped badly in the USA, where one might prefer to look ahead for many reasons.
“Blade Runner” sends its regards: Hugh Jackman as the hunter of memories in the half-sunken Miami of the future.
(Photo: Warner Bros.)
That’s not entirely fair, because it gets exciting when Mae disappears without any explanation and Nick develops such a longing that he gets into his own tank to relive the scenes with her over and over again. That’s the beginning of an addiction problem, and the real-world research he does to find Mae only makes things worse. They lead into a labyrinth of lies and deceit, to the drug dungeons of New Orleans or to the slums off the coast, where the poor live in stilt houses and anger against the rich grows. Mae wasn’t the woman, Nick realizes, who she pretended to be.
Even the way she showed up in Nick’s studio, that was film noir, with a thousand role models all the way back to Dashiell Hammett. The femmes fatales from back then could ultimately be found, whereas Nick looks into the heads of people who still had something to do with Mae. He taps memories, even against the will of their owners – his method has its origins in interrogation technology, sometimes he is also called by the police to extract all knowledge from suspects. And because Mae knew that too, Nick eventually got the idea that she was still communicating with him about the scenes from her past …
This is somewhat reminiscent of the complex thought experiments in Christopher Nolan’s films, in which his brother Jonathan also often participates. It fits that the filmmaker Lisa Joy practically belongs to the Nolan clan. She was still a media attorney when she met Jonathan Nolan, who encouraged her in her writing ambitions and designed the new creation of the series “Westworld” with her. She is now a player in her own right, who even reveals a romantic tendency towards tragedy: in the end, memories are all that remains for her hero.
Reminiscence, US 2021 – Directed and written by Lisa Joy. Camera: Paul Cameron. Music: Ramin Djawadi. With Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, Thandie Newton, Daniel Wu. Distributor: Warner Bros., 116 minutes.