Reminiscence

 

The exactitude that Lisa Joy commits to the creation of Westworld is largely missing from her first feature film, Reminiscence. Joy's stringy sci-fi rumination on love and lawlessness and memory is set in a time when the oceans have risen, flooding coastal cities, and the heat of the day drives human activity to after sundown. That is a rich concept and the production elements are highly effective but aren't enough to sustain interest in the doings of the humans in this world.

Hugh Jackman plays a former soldier / now memory guide named Nick, who helps people mine better times by connecting them to a device that is not fully explained and immersing them in a tank of water, pulling their remembrances from the recessed soup of their consciousness. Helping him is Thandiwe Newton (one of the stars of Westworld) as an alcoholic fellow vet, Watts, who is actually the most interesting character in Joy's drippy story. Into their bleak world comes the mysterious Mae, an oddly tuneless nightclub chanteuse played by Rebecca Ferguson, whom Nick falls for and when she disappears obsesses over. Little time is devoted to Nick and Mae's romance and even less time to building the underworld that Mae and a gallery of rogues inhabit. Much is left to supposition, which isn't sufficient when trying to sell characters as worthy of empathy or enmity.