Reminiscence Review

Voiceover starts before the first image and never stops: Nick Bannister explaining memory, the past and the nature of longing in sentences written to be quoted on a poster. Lisa Joy has a real premise, a drowned Miami where people pay to relive their own recordings while the rich buy up the dry land, and Paul Cameron's photography of nocturnal canals and flooded lobbies is handsome enough to suggest the film this might have been.

Then the plot arrives, and it is Chinatown with the water already risen, a vanished woman, a corrupt land baron, a fixer, assembled without any of the dread that made those parts work the first time. Rebecca Ferguson is asked to be an enigma and given no interior to hide. Jackman plays obsession at one temperature for two hours.

The only performance with grain in it is Thandiwe Newton as Watts, drunk and loyal and visibly aware she is stuck in a worse story than she deserves. The memory tank staging, actors walking through holograms of their own past, is a good idea used the same way every time it appears. By the final reel the script has explained its themes so often that the reveal has nothing left to uncover.