Reminiscence is Lisa Joy’s feature directorial debut that has a fun concept on paper with its genre-blending worldbuilding, but an unbalanced execution as the film seems to forget what it was trying to say from the beginning. As sharp and clever as the movie wants to be, the one thing that hinders it from being memorable is the very world it tries to build itself around.
The story revolves around a machine that enables its users and test subjects to undergo memory tracing so they can relive their favorite memories over and over. Nickolas Bannister (Jackman), who is in charge of putting patients under to navigate their memories, falls in love with Mae (Ferguson), a woman who walks into their dystopian office because she forgot where she placed her keys. She undergoes the process of reminiscing. A relationship soon blossoms between them, but everything seems too good to be true as their relationship turns out to be a not-so-distant memory of Nikolas. When he finds an earring of Mae outside his office after a session, he realizes she might be in danger and vows to track her down using clues from his memory, and memories of those from her dark past.
The script tries to introduce too many ideas into the neo-noir science-fiction story and doesn’t expand on them. The film sucks us into a world where water levels are at an all-time high and where the world is too hot to stroll during the day, so society functions primarily at night. It’s a scary idea that seems like it wouldn’t be too far-fetched with where things are now in 2021. However, the rest of the film fails to utilize any of that world-building to its advantage and serves a purpose to the heart of the story. Why does the story need to be in a climate-devastated world to navigate memories of the past? None of the memories even highlight how wonderful the world was before mankind decided to be, well, mankind.
It seems the only element of science-fiction that does serve a purpose in the movie is the machine itself. And the way the team brings the machine to life so we can get insight into others’ memories is, more or less, fun for the first half. With that said, it ends up as a plot device that becomes all too familiar and plays like a broken record with a formulaic repetition. The machine aspect in the story quickly loses any sense of wonderment the more they go back and forth between memories of the past and the present. Because of this, the climax of the film is anything but climactic as it drowns itself in exposition that we already learned from having to navigate so much from memories. It feels like the film wanted the audience to get sucked into the who-done-it structure and question what is real—but the only question that kept lingering is: is this still trying to trick us into believing something so superficial? It feels very convoluted by the time the credits roll.
There are, however, elements I did enjoy. I’m a sucker for anything noir, and Lisa Joy very much leans into the tropes of any typical noir story that’s been told. Everything from the dialogue, the cinematography, and the motivations of the characters (who are supposedly broken from a messed-up world that we don’t get to explore that all too much) exemplifies what makes noirs typically great. The performances of Jackman and Ferguson are enjoyable, and we get to hear Ferguson sing songs that highlight another perk of the noir genre; however, their characters are both flat and lack the depth needed to get behind the investigation of her disappearance in the first place.
It’s the balance and attempted genre-blending that hinders the story from being anything as great as it wants to be. I can’t help but wonder if Reminiscence would fare better as a television series rather than a two-hour movie that’s bogged in exposition to explain how the world works when the filmmakers don’t explore the world itself. At times, it felt like the story wanted to expand and break out of its constrained shell, but then it’s forced back into an all too familiar tale of love versus loss and greed versus betrayal. In the end, there’s not too much of its bloated idea to hang onto. I am curious what Lisa Joy can bring to other projects, as she does have a conceptual eye. Unfortunately, this film makes me want to reminiscence on the marketing more than the final product.
