Rememory

Rated: PG 13

        I try (but am not too great) at living frugally. I make my own laundry soap and toothpaste, almost everything I cook is 100% from scratch, I buy most of my clothes from clearance bins or thrift stores and I shop around for all major purchases in hopes of getting the best deal. So when outlets such as VUDU or Google Play offer downloads of movies for free I grab them as quickly as possible, whether I have any interest in the film being offered or not.
 
        It is in this way that I first came across the film
Rememory. I can’t say if it was an ad on a website, someone’s tweet, or an email I got, but when I saw that the film would be offered for free for a limited time I made a note to download it as soon as it was available.

        Looking the film up on IMDB made me all the more interested in it. The summary listed there says, “The widow of a wise professor stumbles upon one of his inventions that's able to record and play a person's memory,” and the cast includes such greats as Peter Dinklage, Julia Ormond and Anton Yelchin. Given all of these things combined
Rememory quickly rose to the top of my watchlist.
The film is a technologically futuristic one, (to an extent), in the shape of a traditional whodunnit. Peter Dinklage plays the main character, Sam Bloom, who makes it his mission to find out who killed the wise professor. It’s quickly clear though that Sam, and most of the people he encounters, aren’t what they seem and have much to hide.

        While Anton Yelchin isn’t onscreen for long, he gives a powerful performance as Todd, and makes a great point: in one part of the film he says something along the lines of, “The brain buries certain memories for a reason. Digging them back up again can ruin your life.”  This triggered me into thinking about the film for a day or two afterwards. I won’t get into exactly what I was thinking, as I don’t want to spoil it for you, but it had me going over a lot of “what ifs” over and over again.

        The plot of this film, while seemingly straight forward, had me guessing until the end. As each dot is connected the tapestry gets more and more complex, making the whole thing rather difficult to figure out before all is revealed. And of course, that’s a good thing! Because, at least for me, if I can figure the entire plot out too early in the film it’s not really worth watching.

        Rememory
is a film that will throw your assumptions out the window, and one that proves why Peter Dinklage is held in such high regard these days. It’s both indirect and forthright, blurring the lines between the two in the most exquisite ways. It pushes the boundaries of personal property and the term “living in the past”. And if you get the chance to see it, whether it’s still free or not, you should definitely do it.

        Rememory is rated PG-13, was directed by Mark Palansky and stars Peter Dinklage, Julia Ormond, Anton Yelchin and Martin Donovan. More information about the film can be found here: