Reminiscence, 2021
✫ 6/10
Favorite Character: Mae
“N: …no such thing as a happy ending, all endings are sad, especially if the story was happy.
M: Then tell me a happy story but end it in the middle.”
Reminiscence, a refreshingly ambitious depiction of raw heartbreak, human coping mechanisms, true love, and a collection of unique ideas that made me think.
Set in a future where Miami is flooded due to rising seas, Reminiscence creates a realistic and warningly familiar image of what the near future could look like. The film’s opening shows downtown Miami, skyscrapers poking out from the rolling oceans, and boats littering what used to be roads. Here, director Lisa Joy’s (Westworld) incredible world-building is highlighted in a set of establishing shots that, along with the first piece from the film’s soundtrack (composed by Ramin Djawadi - Game of Thrones, Westworld, a student of Hans Zimmer), make the start of the film very promising.
Reminiscence’s telling of a doomed love story is made possible in part by genre; the sci-fi future allows Joy to introduce a machine that helps people to look back through memory, and the neo-noir cross romance which helps audiences become invested in the story between the main characters: a seemingly rare occurrence of true love in the bleak world Joy creates.
Joy is married to Jonathan ‘Jonah’ Nolan, screenwriter and younger brother of Christopher Nolan. Watching Reminiscence, it is clear that the world-building and structure of the plot are inspired by the great Christopher Nolan. The film has a lengthy 116-minute runtime, and similar to Nolan-made films like Tenet, this amount of time is not really a problem because it is needed to figure out what has happened in the first and second acts. One thing some critics may not appreciate is how complex these first two acts are, but the third act makes keeping up worthwhile.
The idea for Reminiscence was Joy’s own, and she was disappointed when she saw Christopher Nolan release his psychological thriller Memento back in 2000, which was based completely around memory, the theme Joy had been excited to use. However, she still went on to write the screenplay for Reminiscence, which is her first screenplay and was completed in 2013. Six years later, Joy had Hollywood stars Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson on board and signed a release contract with Warner Brothers and Kitler Films.
Jackman plays Nick Bannister, an army veteran with a troubled mind. His performance as the male lead is both mysterious and comforting, the actor harnessing his Bogart-like frown and perfecting the film’s voiceovers with his famously deep American accent, so good I forget he is Australian. We see Bannister search far and wide for his lost love, and Jackman proves again that we can always rely on him for intense action scenes, as well as the softer and more meaningful moments that he shares with Ferguson, who plays Bannister’s love at first sight, Mae.
Ferguson, as usual, gives an effortlessly complex performance, adding much-needed weight to the character of Mae, and working in each scene to subtly incorporate some part of Mae’s backstory into current events. We see Mae through the eyes of different characters, but never truly through her own, a point all too comparable with the human habit of obsessing over what others think of us, and how people will be sure they know someone when their reality is drastically different. Ferguson’s ability to portray layered characters and play into their nuances shines in this film and gives Mae a gravity that kept her in my mind for months after watching the film.
Joy has created an original screenplay that is thrilling to read. Whether through industry pressures or personal choices, Reminiscence has turned it into a not-so-original film, with a definite correlation with the works of Christopher Nolan, and some parts feeling disjointed or flat. However, the themes she has incorporated, and the power of her world and character-building make the film thought-provoking and memorable. Both Jackman and Ferguson portray their characters in a way that connects with the audience and allows us to engage with the film as Bannister searches for his lost love. A film that gets better as it progresses, Reminiscence is a great debut film for Lisa Joy, and definitely a beautiful addition to the sci-fi and neo-noir universe.
