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Sam Bloom (Peter Dinklage) and his brother Dash (Matt Ellis) are driving in the night when their car collides with another, causing his brother’s death.
After a year, scientific pioneer Gordon Dunn (Martin Donovan) mysteriously dies. He has created a device that allows one to record memories and watch them. Bloom sets about trying to solve the murder using this memory machine, while also hoping to recover the memory of his brother's death to understand his final words. Bloom learns that Dunn’s device has a technical fault which causes recurring hallucinations for its users including him. Most of the users have been quite upset with Dunn, directly blaming him for their mental deterioration. He also finds out that Dunn and his wife Carolyn (Julia Ormond) were separated after they lost their only daughter in an accident. After a confrontation with one of his patients, Dunn realized how much pain his machine caused people and attempted to use it to erase his own painful memories. However, doing so resulted in his death when the machine sent him into synaptic failure.
Bloom re-watches his “accident memory” and realizes his brother was just singing song lyrics as he died. The real truth of his memory is realizing that the Dunns were in the other car and that their daughter was killed in the collision. Bloom had fled the scene after seeing the little girl dead, leaving his brother to take the fall. Bloom hands over his memory to Carolyn as a sort of confession apology. Time passes and it is unclear if she watches the memory glass, later she throws it into the sea with Dunn’s recordings as she watches her daughter playing on the water—a hallucination resulting from her own use of the memory device. A montage of the lives of everyone affected by the device is shown over the launch of the repaired memory device while a recording by Dunn plays describing the power of memories for a person.
Sam is last seen at the dock, with a completed model he had created of all of the test subjects, Carolyn, himself, and Dunn and throws it into the water, as a means of allowing himself to let go and move on.
Despite negative reviews for the film itself, Peter Dinklage received praise for his performance as Sam Bloom.
Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 25%, based on 20 reviews with a consensus reading, "Rememory has some intriguing themes and a compelling cast to work with, but they're lost in the fog of a forgettable melodrama."[9]
Guy Lodge of Variety reviewed the film, saying, "A bit of a trudge, despite Dinklage's committed and empathetic performance."[10] Yasmin Kleinbart of The Young Folks and Scott Beggs of Nerdist both went on to say that "Dinklage deserves better than this film."[11][12] Meredith Borders of Birth.Movies.Death. shared similar sentiments, saying, "If it weren't for Dinklage's remarkable performance, the film would have very little to recommend it."[13]
John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter gave a more positive review, saying, "A good-looking mystery whose sci-fi elements take a back seat to meditations on guilt and deception."[1]
See also
Reversion, a 2015 film also dealing with a human memory device
