Warner Bros. Pictures most probably would have liked Reminiscence simply as a noir sci-fi thriller-actioner. In reality, the film starring Hugh Jackman, Thandie Newton and Rebecca Ferguson and written and directed by Lisa Joy, is a context-heavy drama about the acceptance of mortality and the human penchant of clinging to the past.

The story begins with the narrative voice of Nick Bannister (Jackman), set in the future where cities are flooded with water and the disparity between the have and have-nots has grown larger after a war. What that war was, nobody ever spells out for the audience.

Bannister is a jaded veteran of that afore-mentioned war, and now runs the business of reliving memories with his war-friend Emily “Watts” (Thandie Newton; her Watts label makes sense later). People can come and recall their memories in a process called Reminiscence, which involves drugging the client, putting them in a Matrix-like pod filled with water, where electricity and a virtual reality set-up jogs memories that are displayed in front of Bannister in the form of a live projection.

One day in comes Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), a nightclub singer who has lost a key, but who ends up unlocking Bannister’s heart as he looks for it in her memory. The romance — which we see between intercuts of the past and the present — comes to a stop when Mae disappears.

Bannister, distraught in the wake of Mae’s disappearance, turns to the memory device and obsesses over her memory, until a case with the local law enforcement — where Bannister sometimes lends his services — leads to Mae’s past.

The oft-repeated hammering of the themes in Reminiscence bring a clumsy inelegance to what could have been a fine film

While this is Joy’s feature film debut, she had gotten ample experience and fanfare from her executive-produced show Westworld (with husband Jonathan Nolan), where she co-wrote episodes but only directed one of them.

If Joy had stopped where the story worked, leaving out many scenes with wavering tangents that lead to the same conclusion, the ho-hum of the experience might not have been as grating.

It especially hurts that this hefty emotional story has a runtime of 116 minutes; it’s a challenge from the start for the seemingly dry story to attract today’s audiences with short attention spans. What Reminiscence needs to do is to grab the audience by the collar and hold their attention unflinchingly, but it fails and falls into many obvious expositions and red herrings.

Joy writes the noir aspect heavily into the narrative, but lacks the ability to maintain the pace, and her action-shooting skills need finessing (the action sequences feel as if they are shot for TV rather than film).

While the melancholic ambience — set in tone by production designer Howard Cummings (Secret Window and Westworld) — is beautifully laid out in the film, the oft-repeated hammering of the themes brings a clumsy inelegance to what could have been a fine film. Also, it doesn’t help that Jackman and Ferguson have no chemistry to make the ill-fated romance believable.

Released on the same day and date on HBO Max and in theatres internationally, Reminiscence is rated PG-13, with scenes of drug use, sexual content, violence and language

Published in Dawn, ICON, September 5th, 2021