2 hours ago
2
If films had past lives, Simeon Halligan’s memory-regression thriller might have been a glossy 90s psychological drama, a Twilight Zone episode, or even a tricksy Hitchcockian voyage. But in the 2020s, it gets to be a serviceable, low-budget Brit-pulp outing featuring Jeremy Piven who, where other big-name buy-ins might have phoned it in, authoritatively anchors the affair as a celebrity hypnotist leading a client into dangerous waters.
Traumatised Manchester journalist Jason (Aneurin Barnard, soon to be seen as the titular character in Duncan Jones’s Rogue Trooper) is to return to Syria, where six years earlier he witnessed jihadists slit a colleague’s throat. Probably a bad idea then, just before setting off, to volunteer on live TV to be hypnotised by Timothy Bevan (Piven), who claims to allow punters to access past incarnations. Jason is promptly transported into a scarlet, doorway-lined hall of horrors; one portal opens on to a scene of a horrific stabbing apparently committed by his previous self. So pregnant wife Claira (Pixie Lott) presses him to return to Bevan to get this door definitively locked and bolted.
The journalist and the hypnotist effectively play temporal detectives, tracking down the former’s serial-killer predecessor from clues, all shot in giallo-tinted prowler-cam (the first crime scene is on Mangle Street). Halligan’s film is at its best when it subtly layers in creepy subliminals as reality and memory overlap. Jason’s arthritis compression glove mirrors the killer’s sheathed hands, and the howls of a baleful bluesman herald eerie psychic eruptions in his waking life. A not-so-strange coincidence: the musician is also glimpsed in a poster pinned up at the house of a true-crime podcaster (Nicholas Farrell) consulted by the pair.
Sadly, this power of suggestion isn’t well supported by the pile-up of plot contrivances in the film’s hokey final stretch, as Tim McInnerny’s psychology lecturer comes into the frame. Nor does the script credibly back up its insinuations that all this may also be projection, or a case of false memory. Without true ambiguity surrounding this Mancunian candidate, Barnard is left giving a one-dimensional performance, compared with the notes of haughty defensiveness with which Piven props up his character. But it remains watchable throughout, if not in the same mesmeric class as the likes of Danny Boyle’s Trance.
English (US) ·