116 min | PG-13 | August 20, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
The seas have risen and Miami lives by night. Hugh Jackman runs a machine that lets people relive their memories, then a woman walks in and vanishes, and he dives into the past to find her. The film drowns in the same nostalgia it diagnoses.
The world has drowned. Climate change has raised the seas and Miami sits half underwater. People sleep through the brutal days and live by night. Nicolas Bannister runs a business that lets clients relive their own memories inside a tank of water. He sells the past to people who cannot stand the present. Reminiscence presents itself as a noir about a man who falls for a woman and then loses her, but it is really about a culture that has given up on the future and chosen to drown in nostalgia instead.
Hugh Jackman plays Bannister as a man hollowed out by longing. He commits to the obsession and sells the desperation even when the script gives him nothing to chase but a memory. Rebecca Ferguson plays Mae, the lounge singer who walks into his life and then disappears. Ferguson has presence, but the role asks her to be a mystery instead of a person. Thandiwe Newton plays Watts, Bannister’s partner and the only character with a pulse. She drinks, she watches Bannister destroy himself, and she carries the handful of scenes that land while Cliff Curtis and Daniel Wu fill out the genre with stock heavies.
Lisa Joy writes and directs her first feature and brings the visual confidence of her television work to a story that cannot support it. The production design of the flooded city is the best thing on screen. Bannister wades through drowned streets and the camera finds real beauty in the ruins. Then Joy buries every image under constant voiceover that explains what the pictures already show. The narration treats the audience like it cannot follow a plot that is itself a tangle of double crosses and flashbacks. The memory sequences blur into the present until the film loses track of which past it is mourning.
Every piece of this film exists in a better movie. The drowned city recalls Blade Runner. The memory machine recalls Total Recall and Inception. The hard-boiled narration recalls a hundred noirs that earned it. Joy assembles the parts with real ambition and no new idea about how to fit them together. Reminiscence is a beautiful, sodden thing that mistakes longing for a story.