Reminiscence movie review & film summary (2021)

Indeed, you will spot cues from the likes of “Chinatown,” “Blade Runner,” “Strange Days” and even “Minority Report” throughout Joy’s genre entry that culminates in a deeply familiar aura. And while that simple-minded accessibility doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, “Reminiscence” does so little that's original or homage-y with its mélange. Joy’s film just feels so frustratingly generic and second-hand, featuring body doubles and a dizzying spiral staircase that serve no purpose other than telegraphing “Vertigo”-esque visual prompts to the viewer for no narrative or aesthetic reason.

Hugh Jackman’s Nick Bannister happens to be the murmurer of the aforesaid line about the past’s haunting powers. He delivers it through a morose voiceover (one of the many grating overindulgences of “Reminiscence”), introducing his unconventional profession to the viewer in the film’s opening moments. Nick is a private eye who gets to investigate the depths of his clients’ memories—sometimes, to answer a simple question, but often times, to allow them to relive their favorite moments from the past. He and his fellow ex-military business partner Watts (Thandiwe Newton, more emotionally affecting than her one-note part can handle) seem to have a good, platonic thing going in a world where the future offers no hope and past is the only avenue that comes with jolts of optimism buried within. While the duo give freebees to repeat customers often, they still manage to make a living with their memory machine—a cocoon bed and a wired headpiece that plays and projects any memory the client chooses from stashes of discs, as a 3D hologram. Romantic, empowering, peaceful ... there's something for everyone.

So when the resident femme fatale of “Reminiscence” arrives in the form of Rebecca Ferguson’s sultry, markedly sad jazz singer Mae, clad in a spectacular, body-conscious crimson-red gown that could disarm any lethal human in its presence, you know she won’t be up to any good. With misty, Lauren Bacall-esque mannerisms, Mae insists to pop into the machine briefly past the facility’s closing time. She’s lost her keys, you see, and hopes that Watts and Bannister could just retrieve them through a quick peek into her mind. Forgive this attempt to seek real-world logic inside a fantasy, but this request seems to go against everything “Reminiscence” claims to establish about how human mind makes and stores memories. If Mae hasn’t paid attention to the moment when she lost them and can’t recall the whereabouts of her keys, how could a memory of it exist in her mind? And shouldn’t this suspicious request alarm Nick Bannister at once?