‘You’re not able to make rational decisions…’
People obsess over plot. In reality, however, it is possible to make a great film that doesn’t have much of a plot at all. Terrence Malick has made a career out of it. As has Jim Jarmusch. But if you’re going to make a mood piece in which nothing much happens then there needs to be something else to engage the viewers’ interest. With 2023’s Memory, writer-director Michel Franco has all the elements of a great movie but somehow the finished product feels unsatisfying…
Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) is a depressed and emotionally scarred single mother to a teenage daughter. When her sister Olivia (Merritt Weaver) persuades her to attend her high school reunion, things take a dark turn when Sylvia’s former abuser Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) follows her home. While what develops next is far from predictable, there simply isn’t enough plot here to really call this a movie at all. Memory feels more like an episode of what should have been a longer limited series of prestige television.
Chastain and Sarsgaard are both great as ever and there is one particularly electric scene in which we finally find out the truth about why Sylvia is the way she is, but that denouement isn’t enough to save Memory from being what it is – a pretty forgettable movie.
