Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.0

Rememory Blu-ray Movie Review

Out, damned spotless mind.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 28, 2017

In a way Rememory plays like the flip side to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with memory at the core of a story, though in this case with those remembrances being “extracted” and viewed for supposedly therapeutic purposes, instead of being summarily erased (though erasure does in fact ultimately play a part in the overheated plot dynamics). Rememory has a decent enough premise, even if it’s at least somewhat derivative (bringing older films like 1983’s Brainstorm to mind), but the execution and basic screenwriting is arguably so plodding and perhaps laughable at times that even the committed performance of Peter Dinklage can’t save things. The film begins with Sam Bloom (Peter Dinklage) having a few too many with his brother Dash (Matt Ellis) at the local watering hole. Dash is evidently some kind of major rock star, in just one of several plot points that are never adequately addressed or contextualized, though Dash is not long for the world in any case since the opening sequence ends with a calamitous car accident with another vehicle that leads to the character’s death. The film then segues forward (how far forward is, again, never adequately addressed) to find Sam more or less playing with architectural models, in one of those “WTF?” character beats that is supposedly germane to things, but which just comes off as overly precious. The architectural models, specifically the little human figures that designers place around their buildings to recreate what “scale” will look like, somewhat hilariously do come into play somewhat later in the film once the main conceit is unveiled. That involves scientist Gordon Dunn (Martin Donovan), a therapist who has invented a so-called “Cortex” machine that allows patients to view their memories in order to come to grips with whatever trauma they’re trying to deal with. When Dunn ends up mysteriously dead in his office, Sam ends up investigating, in yet another completely unexplained machination that kind of begs the question as to how and why Sam and Dunn are linked. That linkage is more or less explained in an info dump toward the end of the film, but it’s one of those convenient “coincidences” relied upon too frequently by screenwriters, and even this connection doesn’t adequately explain why exactly Sam is so obsessed with the whole Dunn saga to begin with.

Part of the problem with Rememory is that it doesn’t seem to know what kind of film it wants to be. Is it a techno-thriller in the mold of The Circle, with a similar emphasis on the almost paranoiac fears that creep in when technology chips away at privacy? Or is it a murder mystery, with Sam dutifully tooling around town with Dunn’s “memory machine”, interviewing various subjects whose brains have been scanned and whose data is in Sam’s possession? Or is it a more personal psychological drama, exploring the angst of Sam and his own memories after the painful death of his brother? The issue is that Rememory wants to be “a little this-a, a little that-a”, and in the process becomes a kind of silly mishmash that never amounts to anything very suspenseful or meaningful.

When you have Dinklage placing a bunch of little plastic figures (those “humans” in the architectural models he fiddles with) on a table and then labeling them with the suspects’ names and assigning various traits to them, this does not exactly rise to Agatha Christie levels of detective expertise. And the whole vignette structure of the film, with Sam doing things like visiting a World War II veteran who evidently has some kind of dementia and “playing” the guys memories for him with Dunn’s machine just are flat out odd, since they never push the narrative forward (other than to eliminate various suspects). Then there’s the whole belabored relationship between Sam and Dunn’s widow, Carolyn (Julia Ormond), one that certainly seems (for a while) to be based on subterfuge (and in fact is, at least in one salient way), but which supposedly is the emotional core of the film.

There are little tidbits in writer and director Mark Palansky’s work here that hints at philosophical depths which the film never really explores, unfortunately. The “persistence of memory” is addressed in some interesting ways, and in fact how some people are positively haunted by their memories also plays into the proceedings. But kind of like the way Dunn describes memory early in the film, as being subject to everything that happens subsequently to that particular memory, these more compelling data points get refracted by too much pointless (or at least competing) information, and therefore lose a lot of their power.

Rememory Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Rememory is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. This Arri Alexa captured film has a generally very sharp and well detailed image, though as can be seen in some of the screenshots accompanying this review, there are either lighting regimens utilized or outright grading in play, often in blue or brown tones, the darkness of which can occasionally tamp down fine detail levels. That said, even some of the darker material often has pretty crisp and at times disturbing detail levels, as in the car crash that takes Dash's life. Some of the "memories", which are projected on a little screen on Dunn's machine, have an intentionally lower res look than the bulk of the film. The palette is on the drab side quite a bit of the time, something that makes little pops of color like the bow on a coffee maker Sam gives to Carolyn look rather vivid by comparison. There are no issues with image instability or compression anomalies.

Rememory Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Rememory features a workmanlike DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that has bursts of rather nicely done, and maybe even impressive, immersion in moments like the calamitous wreck early in the film, or some of the (brief) memory montages, times where the surround channels kick into gear and there can even be the occasional thrust and parry of pretty forceful LFE. But the bulk of this film is a pretty talky enterprise, with surround activity limited largely to items like ambient environmental sounds and the film's score. Fidelity is fine throughout, with no problems of any kind.

Rememory Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Writer/Director Mark Palansky and Actor Peter Dinklage


• The Memories We Keep (1080p; 31:59) hews to a standard EPK format, but is a bit more in depth than some of these offerings, including some decent interviews.

Rememory Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Without being too churlish, maybe a coinage you hear sometimes on the east coast would be the best response to Rememory: fuhgeddaboutit. That said, Dinklage is interesting in a problematic role, and technical merits are strong for those considering a purchase.