Rating: R | Runtime: 103 minutes
Release Date: December 22nd, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Ketchup Entertainment
Director(s): Michel Franco
Writer(s): Michel Franco

Things were just getting complicated.

Everyone tells Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) that what she remembers from her childhood never happened. Everyone tells Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) that what he’s forgotten did. She tries her best to stay locked in her apartment with teenage daughter Anna (Brooke Timber) so as to avoid the cruel world. He tries to escape his locked home with brother Isaac (Josh Charles) to experience it. So, of course they find themselves on a collision course in Michel Franco’s latest film Memory.

That they do so at a high school reunion is even more on-the-nose considering the whole evening is about nostalgia and remembrance. Like Sylvia’s sister Olivia (Merritt Wever), Saul attends to let those moments flood back while Sylvia does her best to remain unnoticed and thus not risk being triggered by faces that will surely take her back to one of the most harrowing periods of her life. So, when Saul sits down next to her without saying a word, she can’t help grabbing her coat to leave.

The film is structured in an interesting way that forces us to question that which we know about these two characters. We should believe that Saul did what Sylvia accuses him of doing regardless of whether he remembers it and yet the film quickly presents evidence to the contrary. It intrigues insofar as allowing this relationship to blossom where its romance is concerned, but problematic when you begin to ask yourself why Franco would sow that seed of doubt at all.

I found myself watching the rest with dread. To me, the only reason to write the script in this way is to eventually reveal that the evidence was wrong and what Sylvia first believed was true. Yet, that’s not what Franco does. Another shoe will inevitably drop courtesy of learning the facts behind why Sylvia is estranged from her mother (Jessica Harper’s Samantha), but it has nothing to do with Saul. The deflection allows the impact of that revelation to hit home, but it also muddies the narrative waters as far as what it is we’re watching.

The final result still captivates, though. Its value is less about plot than the characters and how their respective brokenness has positioned them to be exactly who the other needs to break free from the psychological and/or physical prisons in which they find themselves. As such, the real draw is performance. Both Chastain and Sarsgaard earn their emotional ache and our attention during happy, sad, and nightmarish times. They’re doing their best to survive the outside entities that attempt to control them, desperate to live in their truth regardless of the societal or familial consequences.

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Peter Sarsgaard and Jessica Chastain in MEMORY; courtesy of Relativity Media.