Amnesiac Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

Amnesiac Blu-ray Movie Review

How Could I Forget You?

Reviewed by Michael Reuben October 18, 2015

Perhaps by design, the trailer for the horror thriller Amnesiac calls up associations with Rob Reiner's 1990 classic, Misery, based on the novel by Stephen King. But as is so often the case, trailers are deceiving. Amnesiac doesn't concern a successful writer who meets his greatest fan, and it doesn't feature a comically terrifying creation like Annie Wilkes, the performance that won Kathy Bates an Oscar for Best Actress. Misery's unique blend of comedy and horror resulted from the fact that both Annie and her novelist captive understood exactly what was happening; they just happened to have radically different goals. In Amnesiac, by contrast, the man who may be at risk has no idea what's going on, because he can't even remember his own name. Like the protagonist in Shattered, he has to accept as true everything that he's told by a woman who claims to be his wife (and maybe she is).

Amnesiac was directed by Michael Polish, who usually works with his twin brother Mark on idiosyncratic creations such as Twin Falls, Idaho, Northfork and The Astronaut Farmer. (They also did the adaptation of Dan Piper's autobiographical 90 Minutes in Heaven.) In this film, however, Michael Polish worked without his brother from a screenplay by Mike Le (the upcoming Patient Zero) and Amy Kohlquist to create what amounts to a star vehicle for actress Kate Bosworth, who served as executive producer (and is also married to Polish). As a director, Polish is in his element telling a tale where everything is meant to appear wrong from the start. Bosworth seems to relish exercising restraint in a role where the temptation to play big must have been hard to resist.

Amnesiac is often deceptive in what it shows, but it pretty clearly opens with some sort of auto accident. Seated in the car are characters identified only as Man (Wes Bentley), Woman (Bosworth) and Audrey (Olivia Rose Keegan), who is listed in the credits simply as "Girl".

When the Man awakens, he cannot remember who he is or what happened. Still, despite the anxiety of having his memory erased and injuries consistent with a car crash—his foot in a cast, his head and face damaged from hitting the windshield—he finds himself in comfortable circumstances. A beautiful and blonde Woman who says she's his wife is caring for him with tenderness and love. He's in a comfortable bed in a large airy room. The Woman feeds him, bathes him and, when he feels up to it, makes loves to him enthusiastically. She tells him she wants to get pregnant.

But the man can tell that something is wrong, even beyond the disorientation caused by his memory loss. His foot in the cast doesn't feel broken. The Woman seems determined to keep him confined to the large, mostly empty room where he awoke, shooing him back to bed whenever he ventures out. Her conversation is erratic, characterized by odd switches of topic and non sequiturs like the plight of elephants in the wild suffering from stress or the fact that the can opener was not invented until many years after the tin can. The Man keeps scanning the Woman's face searching for something he recognizes and drawing a blank, but whenever he dreams, he keeps seeing the face of Audrey in the back seat of the car that crashed. He is certain that the girl is his daughter, but the Woman never mentions her.

As the Man's suspicions grow, he begins exploring his surroundings in secret, but he finds more questions than answers. The house contains no photos of him or the Woman, only old photos of children who may or may not be them as children, and film strips created from those photos. Other discoveries prove even more disturbing and lead to confrontations with the Woman, who has become concerned that the Man isn't trying his best to get "better". Whatever her purpose, it becomes clear that she will not tolerate the slightest risk of discovery, as an unfortunate mailman (Richard Riehle) learns the hard way.

Somewhere, a local detective named Reddecker (Shashawnee Hall) sits at his desk taking reports over the phone about missing persons, ransom notes and suspicious discoveries. Jaded and bored by small town life, he is initially unconcerned by what he hears, but as the reports multiply, he begins to take them more seriously. By the time Reddecker rises from a sitting position and begins taking a personal interest in events transpiring in his town, quite a few people have gone missing.

It would be unfair to reveal any more of what transpires between the Man and the Woman, but let's just say that the proceedings grow both emotionally intense and gorily violent in equal measure. What the Woman wants makes perfect sense, in its own crazy way, and it might even make sense to the Man, if only he could remember all the circumstances leading them to this point. Bosworth brings a cooly detached demeanor to her role, as if the Woman cannot understand why everyone doesn't just cooperate with her efforts to make the world a better, calmer and more orderly place. Like naughty children or pets who misbehave, certain people just need to be shown the error of their ways. If they can't learn, then a minor adjustment should do the trick.

Amnesiac Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Amnesiac was captured with the Arri Alexa by Jayson Crothers (the forthcoming The Ghost and the Whale). Post-production was completed on a digital intermediate, from which XLrator Media's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably sourced by a direct digital path. Much of the film has been lit and/or colored in post-production to create a dream-like, disorienting sensation: through intense backlighting, which tends to blow out detail; through extreme tints, like the reddish glare of the Man's first few nights of recovery; through desaturation, which is how the Man remembers everything relating to the accident; or through what appears to be filters that cast a haze over most interior shots, including Det. Reddecker's office. Indeed, the only scenes that appear remotely normal are the relatively few shots that capture life outdoors.

Within this highly stylized visual design, the Blu-ray image is as sharp and detailed as it can be. Any fall-off in focus or detail appears to be entirely a result of the cinematography rather than a fault in the Blu-ray's technical presentation. There are no obvious artifacts or signs of digital manipulation (other than those associated with post-production), and certainly nothing indicates that the image has been filtered or overcompressed. The average bitrate is 28.04 Mbps, which is a healthy dose of bandwidth for digitally acquired material, and no compression anomalies were evident.

Amnesiac Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The 5.1 sound mix for Amnesiac is presented in lossless DTS-HD MA, and it works at a subtle level to unnerve the viewer. The film has some big events, beginning with the opening car accident, but the sound mixers do not dwell on it, preferring instead to create a general sensation of dread through quietly menacing sounds like dripping water, cats meowing, doors opening and closing, rushes of air and the whir of an old-fashioned film projector. Above all, the film's soundtrack has the understated exchanges between Kate Bosworth's Woman and Wes Bentley's Man, both of whom speak softly, even when the emotions behind the words are explosive. Their dialogue is always clear, as is the dialogue of everyone else. The score is by Aleks de Carvalho (Loitering with Intent), and it is equally restrained, with atmospheric use of piano and strings.

Amnesiac Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 2.39:1; 1:22): "This is what dreams are made of."



• Additional Trailers: At startup, the disc plays trailers for The Diabolical, Time Lapse and the upcoming Wrecker, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Amnesiac Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's at least one other film that Amnesiac calls to mind, but I cannot identify it without giving away crucial plot elements. The other film is a comedy, but it springs from the same thematic well. Amnesiac definitely belongs in the horror genre, but once the truth is revealed, it leaves the viewer with plenty of room for the imagination to fill in more of what happened before the traffic accident that opens the film. What happens to the Man thereafter isn't simply random. Something led up to it, and speculating about the gaps may be part of what gives Amnesiac longevity. Recommended.