Starring: Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, and Anne-Marie Duff
Distributor: StudioCanal
Runtime: 92 mins. Reviewed in Oct 2014
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This mufti-national mystery-thriller film is based on the best-selling 2011 novel of the same name by S. J. Watson about a person who is suffering from severe amnesia, and who learns that her life is a series of untruths. The book sold four million copies world-wide.
Christine Lucas (Nicole Kidman) thinks she has survived a near-fatal car accident which wiped out all her memory of the accident, and she is traumatised by what has occurred. Several years after the accident, things start to look different, and she becomes suspicious of what is happening around her and the people who are now part of her life, including her husband Ben (Colin Firth). She is a middle-aged woman who has no memory of her life from the mid-20s onwards. She is now 40 and the mirror on the wall tells her that she has aged.
Anomalous events start to confuse Christine, who is the central focus of the film. The movie opens with her sleeping next to a mild-mannered man, Ben, she doesn’t recognise, and she is rung daily by a neuropsychologist, Dr Nasch (Mark Strong), she didn’t know she had. Christine has no memory beyond a day, and her husband has to explain everything to her afresh. In a very literal sense, Ben re-frames Christine’s life every 24 hours.
Dr Nasch hints at a brutal attack that occurred some time in the past, but if anything happened, her husband is hiding it from her. A video diary which Christine records daily, at Dr Nasch’s request, confronts her with images of an identity she knows nothing about.
Anne-Marie Duff is Christine’s friend, Claire, who somehow has played a key part in what has happened to her. In her confusion, Christine has no idea who can be trusted.
After Railway Man (2013), Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth are back again and pair off well together. Kidman has clearly recovered from Grace of Monaco (2014) and conveys the encroaching terror of a woman who knows something is terribly wrong. Firth captures effectively the frustration of an intentionally lying husband. Kidman is very good at projecting fragile paranoia (as she did so effectively in Birth, 2004, and Stoker, 2013), and Rowan Joffe’s direction of her holds the tension, as the mystery unfolds.
As the movie develops, the tension mounts. Is Christine imagining dangers that never existed, or is her memory coming back for things that never should have happened?
Eventually, under the weight of all its twists and turns the movie slips into melodrama, and the thriller components of the film begin to ride over the character development of the main players. The movie becomes more creepy than psychologically compelling. The tale unfolds in a smart way that keeps the viewer guessing uncomfortably, but in the end, the film’s plot-twists shock, rather than convince.
The film has shades of Total Recall (1990) and Memento (2000) about it in its telling. It is not a profound, or insightful movie as Memento was, but it provides a good scary night out. The movie stays entertainingly, enjoyably, but a little superficially at the surface of a fragile person’s distorted memory.
Rowan Joffe has a distinctive style, and interestingly directs the film tightly with muted colours and unusual camera-angles. There are Hitchcockian emotional overtones to his direction, especially as it moves to its thriller conclusion, but Alfred Hitchcock would have treated the film’s overarching theme of multi-layered identity – done by him so well in Vertigo (1958) – more plausibly and more coherently.
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