Mark Reviews Movies: REMINISCENCE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 19, 2021

It's rather impressive how quickly and confidently writer/director Lisa Joy establishes the world, science-fiction hook, tone, and stylistic influence of Reminiscence, the filmmaker's debut feature. It's an unspecified time in the future, after climate change has submerged most of Miami and following the aftermath of an uncertain "border war," as well as the proceeding "internal war" that seems to have devastated the morale and psyche of anyone who survived these devastating events. There was nothing to look forward to, our wounded narrator of a protagonist points out, so people started to retreat into the past—specifically, their memories of happier times and significant events.

The voice-over tells us immediately that Joy's screenplay is a reflection of film noir, and indeed, Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman), our guide through this futuristic world of devastation and despair, looks and sounds as if he could have stepped through a time machine from the 1940s or '50s into whatever decade of whatever century in which this story takes place (The name helps, too). He's tough and rugged, as a veteran of at least one of those recent wars, but disheveled and haggard, as someone who gave up a while ago on believing that his life will matter or possess even a glimpse of happiness.

Much of this—the weariness, the sense of uncertainty, the utter pessimism—serves as the foundation of noir. Joy understands this and, cleverly, transplants all of these feelings on to a future that, based on our present (and, more pointedly, our unwillingness to do anything about a terrible future that seems more and more likely), doesn't seem implausible.

The movie opens with a lengthy shot over the city of Miami, with the lower floors of skyscrapers under water and people going about their business at night (a genre staple, explained by the fact that the daytime is simply too hot for people to endure). If there's any bit of hope, it's that people use boats to commute and have built piers along the sides of buildings. Never underestimate the human impulse to adapt to whatever disasters we may create for ourselves.

Then, a beautiful woman unexpectedly walks into Nick's life, and everything changes—for better, at first, and, ultimately, for much worse. Eventually, this becomes the story of the disappearance of the woman, named Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), and a wider web of various crimes—drug dealing, murder, arson, a rich land mogul's immoral and illegal methods to preserve his legacy.

There's a bit of meta-level cleverness in the story's central science-fiction element, which, like Joy's characters and dialogue and focus on a mystery, is all about returning to the past. Nick and friend Watts (Thandiwe Newton), a fellow vet possessing her own demons, help them, with a tank of fluid, an electrode that surrounds a client's head, and some probing questions. People can re-live their memories within their minds. Nick watches, as a military pal plays catch with his favorite dog, a woman recalls a rendezvous with a man she loved, and Mae tries to remember where she lost her keys.

All of this early establishing material is fascinating and quite engaging, because Joy keeps matters simple (There's no over-explaining the technology, which seems capable of creating more details than seems possible) and focuses on a sort of gut feeling—the mood of gloom, the undercurrent of longing, the desire to escape from this grim reality into a time when things made sense. Once Mae and Nick go through the motions of romance and she disappears, though, the plot and a series of mostly routine action sequences overwhelm those feelings, the story's simplicity, and any real sense of these characters as more than pawns moving through a game of rather hasty mystery.

The basics of the plot involve Nick's growing obsession with finding out what happened to Mae, going through his every memory of his time with her to find some idea as to who she was, why she left, and what she might actually have been doing with him. It's more than a bit disappointing to watch as Joy's initial world-building and establishment of tone become diminished, as the mystery unravels one fairly loose knot at a time.

Even the central gag of re-living and re-experiencing memories becomes an easy way for Nick to find all of the clues that Joy lays out in a straightforward path. We eventually meet a crooked cop (played by Cliff Curtis), who did his shady business in the equally submerged New Orleans and probably has all the answers, as well as that land mogul (played by Brett Cullen) and his family, who really don't want Nick looking into their own shady ventures. These, of course, are genre staples, too, but they're missing the level of detail and specificity that Joy creates in that first act.

All of it eventually comes together—at least in terms of the couple layers of plot here. After all of that early promise and even though the resolution does return some emotional grounding to the story's themes of longing for the past, too much of Reminiscence feels like routine.

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