100 min | NR | October 6, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A man wakes from a car crash with no memory of his wife, his job, or his own daughter. A neurologist offers to hypnotize him back to himself, and something is waiting in the dark behind his eyes. The premise has teeth, even when the twist shows its hand early.
Nolan Wright survives the car crash that kills his wife and leaves a hole where his memory used to be. He cannot recognize his own daughter. He cannot remember his job, his friends, or the man he used to be. A neurologist named Dr. Lillian Brooks offers an experimental treatment that drops him into a hypnotic state to recover the lost images. The film is a science-fiction thriller about identity. It asks whether the self is the memories you carry or the person you become when those memories are gone.
Mamoudou Athie plays Nolan with a raw, searching desperation. He is a father terrified that he is failing his child and a man unsure whether the stranger in old photographs deserves to be recovered. Athie commits fully to the disorientation. Amanda Christine plays his daughter Ava as the adult in the relationship, parenting her own father with weary patience. Phylicia Rashad plays Dr. Brooks with a calm authority that curdles into something colder as the treatment continues. The body horror inside the hypnosis sessions comes from contortionist Troy James, whose backward-bending limbs make the figure stalking Nolan’s memory genuinely unnerving.
Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr. directs his feature debut from a script he co-wrote with Stephen Herman. He stages the memory dives as flat suburban interiors that fracture into wrongness. The contorted figure appears at the edge of frames before it strikes, and the sound design lets a low electronic hum bleed into the hypnosis scenes so the audience knows it is sliding into the wrong place. The visual debt to Get Out is plain in the way ordinary domestic spaces turn menacing. Osei-Kuffour controls the early reveals with patience and lets dread accumulate before the mechanism of the plot becomes clear.
The first half earns its tension through Nolan’s confusion and the slow horror of the sessions. The second half spends that tension on a twist the structure telegraphs too early. The premise belongs to the Twilight Zone tradition, and the film honors that lineage without surprising anyone who knows it. What holds it together is Athie, who plays a man fighting for a self he cannot remember and makes the fight matter. This is a competent, well-built thriller that does familiar things with conviction.