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Now that Nicolas Cage has had his stock upgraded as of late (thanks to his lovely performance in “Pig” and his self-aware turn in the recent “ The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent ”), and Bruce Willis has retired, I suspect that Liam Neeson is going to be the next actor who finds himself in the critical crosshairs for doing far too many forgettable movies. His latest, “Memory,” is already his second such film in 2022, and since his list of upcoming projects on IMDb mentions titles like “Retribution,” “In the Land of Saints and Sinners,” “The Revenger” and “Cold Pursuit Sequel Project,” it doesn’t appear that he will be disembarking this particular gravy train anytime soon. To his credit, “Memory” is at least slightly more ambitious than most of the similar films Neeson has done recently. But it's certainly not enough to make you overlook how one of our most powerful actors is again wasting his time on the kind of half-baked thriller Charles Bronson used to crank out with depressing regularity during the waning days of his career.

The time around, Neeson plays Alex Lewis , another expert hired killer with a particular set of skills. As this film opens, he's considering leaving the life behind after seeing signs of the Alzheimer’s that has already claimed his brother. Nevertheless, Alex accepts one final job in El Paso, in which he has to bump off two separate people and recover some important flash drives from the first victim. He pulls off the first hit easily enough but when he discovers that the second victim is a 12-year-old girl ( Mia Sanchez ), Alex refuses to pull the trigger and keeps the flash drives for himself as an insurance policy.

Unfortunately, the girl had been pimped out by her father to a number of wealthy and powerful people, including the depraved son of powerful real estate developer Davana Sealman ( Monica Bellucci ), who put out the original hit in order to help her child evade justice. After tying up that loose end, she also calls for Alex to be killed. But even though he's slipping mentally, he's still skillful enough to evade her hired goons and kill everyone remotely connected to the crime. Alex also plants enough clues for an FBI task force led by Vincent Serra ( Guy Pearce ), who also tried to help the girl and feels guilty about what happened to her, to pursue him while always remaining one step ahead of them.

If the basic story points of “Memory” sound familiar to you, it may be that you've seen “ The Memory of a Killer ,” the 2003 Belgian crime drama that has been Americanized here (with both films based on Jef Geeraerts ’ novel The Alzheimer Case ). Although this version more or less follows the same narrative path of its predecessor, the original film, although a perfectly good genre film in its own right, was more interested in its central character (played in a very good performance by Jan Decleir ) as he is forced to reckon with both the weight of his past misdeeds and the cruelties of his present condition. 

“Memory” does begin to work when Neeson gets a hold of script's more dramatically impactful moments, but these scenes are simply too few and far between to be truly effective. Dario Scardapane ’s screenplay tends to put more of an emphasis on the big action beats, which are implausible enough as is and doubly so when you consider that they involve a character with deteriorating cognitive abilities. Although these scenes are handled with some style by director Martin Campbell , whose oeuvre includes one of the very best James Bond films (“Casino Royale”) and a lot of stuff that will be politely overlooked here, they wind up overwhelming the human drama involving Neeson’s character. This is especially evident during a new, less thoughtful finale in which one of the key villains is dispatched in an especially gruesome manner in order to give the gorehounds in the audience a final thrill before the end credits. Other than Neeson, the only performance of note here comes from Bellucci, whose casting here is unexpected, to say the least.

“Memory” is a little better than the majority of Neeson’s recent action excursions and there's a chance it may prove to be better than most of his future projects. However, that doesn't prove to be enough to make it worth watching, and those lucky enough to have seen “The Memory of a Killer” are likely to be disappointed as well. Yes, a little more effort has gone into the making of "Memory," so it's a shame—and an ironic one to boot—that the end results are so forgettable.

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Peter Sobczynski

A moderately insightful critic, full-on Swiftie and all-around  bon vivant , Peter Sobczynski, in addition to his work at this site, is also a contributor to The Spool and can be heard weekly discussing new Blu-Ray releases on the Movie Madness podcast on the Now Playing network.

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Memory (2022)

Rated R for violence, some bloody images and language throughout.

114 minutes

Liam Neeson as Alex Lewis

Guy Pearce as Vincent Serra

Taj Atwal as Linda Amistead

Harold Torres as Hugo Marquez

Monica Bellucci as Davana Sealman

Ray Stevenson as Detective Danny Mora

Stella Stocker as Maya

Antonio Jaramillo as Papa Leon

• Martin Campbell

Writer (book)

• Jef Geeraerts
• Dario Scardapane

Cinematographer

• David Tattersall

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‘Memory’ Review: Michel Franco Gets Unforgettable Performances From Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard

The tough art-house director of 'After Lucia' and 'Sundown' applies his rigorous style to a more optimistic story, presenting an unconventional romance between two damaged-goods New Yorkers.

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Peter Debruge

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“ Memory ” feels like the “Silver Linings Playbook” of Michel Franco ’s career: an unexpectedly accessible romance between two damaged human beings, from an independent director who’s been known to put characters through some of life’s most punishing indignities. For those familiar with Franco’s work, the previous film it most resembles is “Chronic,” though the tough-love auteur spares us the bummer ending this time around. In that movie, he followed a hospice nurse through his rounds, then abruptly cut to black when the guy was sideswiped by a car. Womp-womp. When a director does that early in his career, audiences are right to be wary.

It may sound like a theoretical conceit to bring such characters into each other’s lives: She’s tormented by past trauma she can’t forget, while he’s bothered by an inability to recall much of anything. But Franco treats his characters like real people, rather than constructs, and in this case, the actors are especially convincing in their roles. Chastain has made far more awards-friendly movies than this, but she’s never appeared more vulnerable on-screen — as both the character and a performer willing to tackle what’s sure to be a divisive character.

“Memory” introduces Sylvia in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. She’s 13 years sober, the same age as her daughter, Sara (Brooke Timber). Sylvia has fashioned her life in a way that gives her control over the things she can. Resisting the kind of clumsy exposition where people describe their backstory (which might have easily fit into that AA meeting), Franco prefers to reveal his characters through action. Sylvia works at an adult daycare center and keeps her social life to a minimum, compulsively setting the security alarm each time she enters her Brooklyn apartment. She’s hyper-vigilant about Sara’s behavior, forbidding the teenager to be around alcohol or boys.

Long before Sylvia explains her history of assault, her behavior says a lot about her own teenage experience. No wonder she’s creeped out when Saul follows her home from the reunion. But she’s also sharp enough to notice that something’s not quite right about this man, surely drawing on her training as a social worker. After Sylvia’s stalker spends the night on her stoop, she contacts his guardian, Isaac (Josh Lucas), and discovers Saul’s dementia.

Meanwhile, Sylvia’s sister (Merritt Wever) points out that the timing doesn’t line up: The girls transferred to a different school before Saul arrived, making it unlikely that he molested her. Strange that Sylvia’s memory sees it differently. What else might she be confused about? (Her estranged mother, played by ’70s cult icon Jessica Harper, accuses Sylvia of lying. But it’s just as likely that the older woman is in some kind of denial.)

So far, the film could be accused of being rather schematic — of setting up a situation where audiences must decide whether to believe the victim or to give the benefit of the doubt to the accused. Then the characters’ behavior steers “Memory” in an unexpected direction. Isaac asks Sylvia if she’d be willing to be a nurse to Saul, and she agrees. At this point, it’s not clear whether she sincerely intends to help or has some kind of revenge on her mind. Franco resists the reductive path, allowing these two lonely people to bond. Both are fussed over by family members with a tendency to infantilize them. Sylvia’s kid sister assumes the more responsible role, while Saul’s brother has conservator-like control over his charge. Later, we discover what happens when he’s left alone.

Reviewed at Sunset Screening Room, Sept. 5, 2023. In Venice, Toronto film festivals. Running time: 100 MIN.

• Production: (U.S.-Mexico-Chile) A Teorema, High Frequency Entertainment, MUBI production, in association with Screen Capital, Caste Study Films. (World sales: The Match Factory, Cologne, Germany.) Producers: Michel Franco, Eréndira Núñez Larios, Alex Orlovsky, Duncan Montgomery. Executive producers: Paula P. Manzanedo, Moises Chiver, Jack Selby, Patricio Rabuffetti, Tatiana Emden, Joyce Zylberberg, Ralph Haiek, Michael Weber, Efe Cakarel, Bobby Allen, Jason Ropell.
• Crew: Director, writer: Michel Franco. Camera: Yves Cape. Editor:
• With: Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Brooke Timber, Merritt Wever, Elsie Fisher, Jessica Harper, Josh Charles.

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Memory review – survivors grapple with an unstable past in a delicate, painful duet

Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard excel in Michel Franco’s absorbing story about the unnerving reunion of a care worker and a friend from her past

M exican film-maker Michel Franco, famed for his icily contrived, pitilessly controlled dramas, often shown in static tableau scenes, has made another of his complex, painful and densely achieved movies; at Venice it won its leading man, Peter Sarsgaard, the Volpi cup for best actor. It is about abuse, violence, recovery and the redemptive power of sexual intimacy, but also about just what its title proclaims: memory, and how this accumulates over a lifetime to form an identity. Yet memory is unreliable building material; memory is the uncertain support underneath us, but solid as a crushing burden above us, a destructive gravitational force that could annihilate us entirely. And apart from anything else, memory is not necessarily the truth, so attempts to deny it are not necessarily dishonest or delusional.

This movie has the same piercing clarity as Franco’s other films, and two exceptionally intelligent leading performances, but with a warmer and more emollient outcome – so much so that you might wonder if the pill hasn’t been sugared, just slightly. Audiences might, moreover, be sufficiently vulgar (like me) as to wonder if there isn’t going to be a big third-act reveal. But Franco is entirely justified in aiming more for the non-narrative messiness of life itself.

Sylvia, played by Jessica Chastain, is a social worker and care worker, a single mother with a smart teenage daughter, Anna (Brooke Timber). She is a recovering alcoholic and has been sober 13 years – as long as her daughter has been alive. We see her at the end of an AA meeting, and never hear her disclose her avowed reasons for being an alcoholic. Has she shared these with the group? We can’t tell. Her status as a care worker has a resonance with Franco’s previous film, Chronic , which shows the professional intensity of the worker’s relationship to the patient: a relationship almost erotic in its closeness.

Chastain plays Sylvia as someone displaying the tough self-reliance of a survivor, but highly strung, with an anger and pain that is only just being kept beneath the surface. Her home is in a tough part of Brooklyn in New York; she has a reasonably good relationship with her more comfortably-off sister, Olivia (Merritt Wever), but is utterly estranged from her overbearing mother, Samantha, a powerfully toxic performance from Jessica Harper.

Against her better judgment, Sylvia goes to her high school reunion, but almost immediately a very disturbing thing happens. A shambling figure called Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) comes wordlessly up to Sylvia with an odd, blank smile. She simply stands up and leaves and this man follows her home. It transpires that Saul is suffering from early onset dementia, living in his own house with his testy brother Isaac (Josh Charles) as his carer. Apologetic Isaac attributes this inappropriate behaviour entirely to Saul’s condition; but Sylvia remembers him from school and, having offered to look after him one afternoon, confronts him with what she remembers him and other boys doing to her.

Baffled, frightened Saul can’t remember it. But when Isaac offers Sylvia some very lucrative work caring for Saul – who seems, in his gentle, timid way, to have taken a shine to her – she accepts and their relationship appears to be a mysterious route out of her unhappiness. Yet this isn’t a kind of Night Porter horror story. The past is unstable and so is the present. Already we know that, like many people with dementia, Saul struggles to get to grips with the immediate past, but not the distant past. Could it be that Sylvia has the memory problem? At all events, their carer-patient relationship continues to develop.

A more conventional thriller might have stuck with the first premise, as disclosed in the original confrontation scene, and then developed something disturbing from there. But this isn’t Franco’s procedure. He wants to show something genuinely positive, without irony or distance, and tell a story in which Saul is aware of his own condition and aware of how he could get into serious trouble. When he sleeps over at Sylvia’s, Saul gets up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom; coming back, he can’t remember which door leads to Sylvia’s room and which to Anna’s. It is a moment of pure suspenseful fear. This is an absorbing story, acted with superlative delicacy and maturity by Chastain and Sarsgaard.

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‘memory’ review: jessica chastain and peter sarsgaard are riveting as broken people fumbling for connection in michel franco’s moving drama.

The Mexican auteur’s Brooklyn-set third English-language film also features Josh Charles, Merritt Wever, Jessica Harper and promising newcomer Brooke Timber.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Chastain plays Sylvia, a recovering alcoholic, three years sober, and a care worker at a facility for people with mental health conditions. Guarded in the extreme and clearly damaged, the single mother lives with her daughter Anna (Timber) and is so vigilant in her supervision that the teenager complains she’s the only girl in her class without a boyfriend.

At a high school reunion to which she’s dragged along by her younger married sister Olivia (Wever), Sylvia bristles when she’s approached by fellow attendee Saul (Sarsgaard). This causes her to bolt, and he freaks her out by following her home on the subway, camping outside the front door of her apartment building. When she finds Saul still there unconscious the next morning after spending all night in the freezing rain, Sylvia calls the emergency contact on his ID, his brother Isaac (Charles), to come retrieve him.

As they begin spending more time together, the evolving closeness between Sylvia and Saul reveals the acute loneliness they have in common.

Chastain and Sarsgaard bring enormous pathos to the mix of caution and need with which they navigate their tentative bond. There are touching moments such as his elation over the organ riff in “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and gentle humor when he sheepishly reveals while watching a movie that it’s a futile activity for him, since he can’t remember the beginning by the time he gets to the end.

Both actors play their characters’ nervous dance around trust issues with affecting emotional candor; likewise, their hungry clumsiness when the relationship becomes physical. They draw together and pull apart as the changes in Sylvia’s carefully regimented routine throw off her composure, and Isaac takes steps to block her from seeing his brother.

In an adjacent thread that eventually spills over into Sylvia’s time with Saul, traumatic childhood experiences become exposed like raw nerves when she discovers by chance that her estranged mother, Samantha (Harper), has made contact with Anna through the teen’s aunt. The volatile elements of sexual abuse, denial, silence and guilt are familiar from many films of this thematic nature. But the taut interplay among the women in the ensemble creates genuinely distressing and moving moments.

Sarsgaard is particularly strong here, fully inhabiting Saul’s vulnerability and his dazed embarrassment when he’s suddenly out of his depth, but nonetheless summoning moments of strength and assertiveness.

Chastain can lean a little hard into technique at times, showing the work behind the characterization, and Franco’s writing has a hint or two of textbook psychological study, like making Sylvia a compulsive cleaner as something she can control when her equilibrium feels threatened. But there’s blistering pain in Chastain’s performance, and years of rage behind the reinforced walls Sylvia has put up around herself. The wariness with which she feels her way around tricky situations makes it clear that trust will never come easily to her.

Memory is arguably Franco’s most compassionate film — and the best of his English-language features, following Chronic and Sundown . You long for Sylvia and Saul to get beyond the many hurdles in their path and find mutual solace, a marked change from the bleak finality for which the director’s work is predominantly known.

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‘Memory’ Review: A Trauma Plot

In this contrived movie, Peter Sarsgaard stars as a man with dementia, and Jessica Chastain plays a caretaker with buried family secrets.

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By Manohla Dargis

In “Memory,” a woman haunted by her past meets a man who’s scarcely holding onto his. That’s the setup in the writer-director Michel Franco’s contrived drama with Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, whose work in this artsified slab of exploitation cinema is strong enough that you wish their characters would run off to an entirely different movie.

Chastain plays Sylvia, a recovering alcoholic with a day job caring for disabled adults. She and her sweet teenage daughter, Anna (Brooke Timber), have a spacious, sunlit apartment in an industrial-looking building in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. There’s a tire store next door and multiple locks on their apartment door. Each time Sylvia returns home, she fastens the locks and arms the alarm with great deliberation, a ritual that Franco repeatedly presents. It’s a habit that like Sylvia’s wariness and physical reserve — she doesn’t readily make eye contact and tends to cross her arms in front of her chest — underscores her guardedness.

One night, Sylvia and her sister, Olivia (the always welcome Merritt Wever), attend a high-school reunion. There, a visibly uncomfortable Sylvia withdraws into herself, but when a man — Sarsgaard as Saul — approaches her, she splits for reasons that become torturously clear only later. He follows her onto the subway and all the way to her building’s front door, where he stays even when it begins pouring. The next morning, Sylvia finds him shivering and near-incoherent, sitting in a spare tire on the ground. It turns out that Saul has early-onset dementia and lives in his handsome brownstone, watched over by his no-nonsense brother, Isaac (Josh Charles), whose daughter, Sara (Elsie Fisher), comes and goes.

Soon, Sylvia begins taking care of Saul part-time, a job that turns intimate and then unsurprisingly romantic. The relationship doesn’t cohere dramatically, alas, despite the demonstrative tenderness and commitment that the actors bring to it, and the story’s multiple gaps in logic don’t help. It doesn’t make sense that Isaac, who comes off as a fairly self-important professional, doesn’t have any hired help when Sylvia arrives, especially given the family’s obvious economic resources. (I also seem to have missed the scene when he runs a background check on her.) Like Olivia’s husband and kids, a collection of bland types, Isaac mainly serves as a convenient bourgeois prop that Franco can swing at before blowing it up.

Chastain reliably holds the screen even if her performance often feels overly studied rather than lived in, never more so than in her scenes with Sarsgaard, whose delicate, quicksilver expressiveness appreciably deepens both the movie and its stakes. You don’t always believe in Sylvia and Saul as a couple, but Sarsgaard makes you want to. Certainly the two actors give you a reason to watch this movie, which grows all the more complicated and then tauntingly nutso with the entrance of Sylvia’s estranged mother, Samantha (a vivid Jessica Harper as monstrous maternity incarnate). Samantha, who’s remained in contact with Olivia, is thinking of moving nearby, mostly, it seems, so that Franco can destroy Sylvia’s fragile equanimity.

Franco, whose movies include “After Lucia” and “Sundown,” likes to approach his anguish-laden stories (of rape, abuse, murder) with relatively calculated coolness and art film-lite trappings. It’s obvious from the get-go that Sylvia is deeply troubled, probably by her past. Although Franco scatters hints here and there, he also withholds the worst until a late, awkwardly staged meltdown filled with tears, shouting and ugly, unsurprising revelations. If until that moment, Sylvia has not yet fully addressed her pain — including in any of the A.A. meetings she attends — it’s not because she’s especially tight-lipped. Rather, Franco saves her big reveal for maximum narrative oomph, turning one woman’s suffering into a packaged spectacle.

Memory Rated R for male nudity. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic of The Times, which she joined in 2004. She has an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Memory Review

A slick action-thriller that forges a fresh take on the genre… then forgets all about it..

Memory hits theaters on April 29, 2022.

I know what you’re thinking – Liam Neeson in yet another old man action flick. But Memory does bring something new to the table, at least: Alex Lewis (Neeson) is a hitman on the verge of retirement. But he’s hiding a terrible secret, and it’s not a government conspiracy or a trail of bodies in his wake. No, Alex has Alzheimer’s and it’s affecting his work in a big way. While Memory has a strong premise that suggests a whole new take on the action-thriller genre, it’s sadly let down by an uninspired and fairly standard storyline.

Essentially, Memory is a bog-standard action flick with a few fresh ideas thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, director Martin Campbell doesn’t quite stick the landing, with the most interesting aspects of the film feeling wildly underdeveloped.

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Take Alex’s Alzheimer’s, example. It’s not often you see a hitman grappling with the onset of a degenerative disease, and the little moments that show how it’s affecting him are some of the best in the movie. Neeson is remarkably subtle as he struggles with the memory loss, the slowing of fine motor skills, and the loss of judgement that are all early signposts for Alzheimer’s Disease.

However, often Memory feels like a missed opportunity. Although we watch Neeson struggle through some excruciatingly tense scenes, we don’t really feel what it’s like in Alex’s shoes. There’s plenty of opportunity to visualise Alex’s faltering memory in a unique and interesting way – Eternal Sunshine -style disappearing memories would have brought us closer to the man himself, just as seeing the world through his eyes would give us perspective on his condition as well as his plight.

What’s Liam Neeson’s best action flick?

Instead, we experience Alex’s trauma second hand. At various points throughout the film, he loses grip on what’s going on, often prompting him to angrily demand to know what’s happening or whimper with terrified shock at a predicament he had no idea he was in. Ironically, Neeson portrays the pain and suffering of a degenerative condition with finesse, vacillating seamlessly between seasoned contract killer and vulnerable Alzheimer’s patient. It just feels as though it could have gone a lot deeper, and as a result, it only touches the surface of what it could’ve been.

That said, Memory has some interesting style choices – especially when it comes to the way Campbell framed the action scenes. They’re often choppy, quick cut, and highly edited. At first glance, it’s another stylish way to depict frenzied, frenetic action, but it’s more than that. It’s also a neat way to approach the retiring hitman’s patchy memory by not quite showing the full sequence of events. But this, too, is sparse and underutilised.

Based on the novel De zaak Alzheimer by Jef Geeraerts, Memory trades the book’s very European setting for a Latin American twist, putting the action in El Paso, Texas. It works, too, with Alex now fighting to uncover a Mexican child prostitution ring with FBI agent Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce) as an unwitting aide. There are distinct shades of Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario in the way the story unfolds, and it would be easy to draw comparisons between Neeson’s ageing hitman and Benicio del Toro’s former Mexican prosecutor-turned-assassin. But it’s just that – shades. Memory is nowhere near as dark or complex, with a tendency to only delve surface deep.

Similarly, Guy Pearce’s world-weary FBI agent is almost a caricature rather than a real, warts and all portrayal of a man on the job. Pearce gets some great one-liners about how difficult it all is, with an interesting backstory that’s merely hinted at. But his character, too, is relatively underdeveloped. It’s a shame – something about this dynamic brings to mind the Luc Besson classic, Léon … but perhaps it’s just Pearce’s dodgy moustache.

Either way, there’s a lot going on underneath the surface. It’s just a shame we never really get to it.

Altogether, Memory is a surprisingly straightforward action-thriller that doesn’t quite live up to its premise. That’s a real shame, too. The twist on the tried-and-true formula is interesting enough to warrant a deeper exploration of memory and perception when it comes to such a violent profession. Sadly, it seems Campbell isn’t up to the task, stopping a bit short of making any poignant or even interesting observations. Instead, Memory meanders between rote action flick and not-quite-interesting-enough conspiracy thriller. It’s too bad that Memory is so unambitious; if it had only leaned into its intriguing premise more, it could’ve been much more than a rote action flick.

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Memory is an adequately stylish action-thriller that showcases Neeson’s deftness with a silenced pistol or a well-cut fight scene. It brings some fresh and interesting new ideas with a focus on the faltering memory of Neeson’s ageing hitman, but then does little to expand on that. Instead, we’re shown the occasional scene of Neeson forgetting something while prompting Guy Pearce to muse on the conspiracy-style plot. But the twists and turns are far too few to keep it interesting. Memory could have been a fresh and exciting take on the genre. Instead, it’s a typical old man action flick that’s ironically not very memorable at all.

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clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

Noirish ‘Memory’ is a cut above the average Liam Neeson action flick

A hit man with alzheimer’s disease develops a conscience when he’s hired to kill a 13-year-old girl.

There’s a sameness to many of the roles Liam Neeson takes these days. With a few notable recent exceptions that still prove his depth and range — “ Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House ,” “ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs ,” “ Ordinary Love ” — the Oscar-nominated star of “ Schindler’s List ” has lately become more associated with action thrillers in which he plays a certain type: an emotionally damaged, perhaps even demon-driven antihero/loner plagued by alcoholism, an ethically compromised past, grief or some other psychic pain whose quest for redemption has turned him into an avenging angel. The quality of these films fluctuates between satisfying and disappointing, for the same reason. Because Neeson is so adept at rendering this stock character, he doesn’t always work very hard at it. Sometimes that effortlessness is a pleasure, and sometimes it just feels lazy.

Liam Neeson, a beloved action star who can pack an emotional punch

In plot, at least, “Memory” is no exception. Based on the 1985 novel “De Zaak Alzheimer” by Belgian writer Jef Geeraerts and its 2003 Belgian film adaptation, “The Memory of a Killer,” Neeson’s latest genre exercise centers on a hit man with dementia who suddenly sprouts a conscience when one of the targets he’s been hired to kill turns out to be a 13-year-old girl. And yet “Memory” is a cut above average, for this sort of thing. Mostly that’s thanks to the direction of Martin Campbell (“ Casino Royale ”), who injects the same freshness of energy into this formulaic outing that he did with last year’s assassin thriller “ The Protege .”

“Memory” feels more like film noir — deliciously dark, cynical and slightly amoral — than a pulpy piece of rote storytelling.

Neeson, for one thing, isn’t really the good guy here, or really even the bad guy with a heart of gold. His Alex Lewis is a coldblooded killer. With one exception — the barely teenage prostitute (Mia Sanchez) Alex refuses to kill after he’s hired to kill a couple of people to cover up a child-exploitation ring — he has few qualms about whom he murders. Cops, in particular, are so much collateral damage in Alex’s single-minded mission to take out the members of the international sex-trafficking cartel. The fact that he’s starting to lose his memory, and must write reminders down on his forearm with a Sharpie, barely makes him more sympathetic.

It’s a weird feeling, not being able to root wholeheartedly for Neeson. But I kind of like it. It feels honest, and less pandering.

Some cops, however, are spared. Two members of the FBI’s Child Exploitation Task Force (Guy Pearce and Taj Atwal), along with a Mexican detective (Harold Torres) on loan to the FBI, are allowed to live so they can perform cleanup on the messy pile of corpses Alex leaves behind in his path of vengeance. Mostly, as Pearce’s Agent Vincent Serra observes, that entails “taking out” the traffickers whom Vincent and the task force aren’t legally able to execute, while leaving the feds a trail of “breadcrumbs.”

Vincent’s pursuit of Alex, while following those breadcrumbs, is the engine that drives the plot. (The casting of Pearce, who in 2001’s “ Memento ” played an amnesiac pursuing his wife’s killer while marking his own body with clues, is a nice sort of callback.)

“Memory” is by no means a deep film. But there’s something here that lends the familiar proceedings a bittersweet aftertaste that lingers in the mind. That’s the film’s mix of moral ambiguity and the regret of someone for whom it’s too late to undo the past, but not perhaps to rectify the present, even when the law can’t. In the words of Vincent: “Memory’s a mother-f---er. And as for justice, it ain’t guaranteed.”

R. At area theaters. Contains violence, some bloody images, brief nudity, mature thematic elements and coarse language throughout. 114 minutes.

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

An assassin-for-hire finds that he's become a target after he refuses to complete a job for a dangerous criminal organization. An assassin-for-hire finds that he's become a target after he refuses to complete a job for a dangerous criminal organization. An assassin-for-hire finds that he's become a target after he refuses to complete a job for a dangerous criminal organization.

• Martin Campbell
• Dario Scardapane
• Jef Geeraerts
• Liam Neeson
• 300 User reviews
• 102 Critic reviews
• 41 Metascore

• Vincent Serra

• Linda Amisted

• Hugo Marquez

• Gerald Nussbaum

• Davana Sealman

• William Borden

• Maryanne Borden

• Wendy Van Camp

• Ellis Van Camp

• Andy Villalobos

• Randy Sealman
• (as Vlado Mihailov)
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• Trivia Based on the Belgian film The Memory of a Killer (2003) , directed by Erik Van Looy (known for The Loft (2014) written by Carl Joos (known for Cordon (2014) , The Treatment (2014) and The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012) ).
• Goofs At around 1.16.20 into the movie, as Detective Hugo Marquez (Harold Torres) enters the bakery, a hand can be seen three times in quick succession, throwing pigeons into the frame.

Special Agent Vincent Serra : [from the trailer] Did you just give me an alibi?

• Connections Referenced in Life is Short with Justin Long: Guy Pearce (2022)
• Soundtracks Scent from the Past Written by Giordano Trivellato & Giuliano Sacchetto Published by Tobacco Music Edition Performed by Relaxing Instrumental Jazz Academy Courtesy of Equilibrium SRL

User reviews 300

• PerryAtTheMovies
• Apr 29, 2022
• How long is Memory? Powered by Alexa
• April 29, 2022 (United States)
• United States
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• El Paso, Texas, USA (Downtown exteriors, Scenic Drive, Rim Road)
• Briarcliff Entertainment
• Open Road Films (II)
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $30,000,000 (estimated)
• May 1, 2022
• $13,897,255

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• Runtime 1 hour 54 minutes

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Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard Are So Weirdly Right Together in Memory

This review was originally published on September 9. We are recirculating it now timed to Memory’ s debut in theaters.

The waning days of a film festival aren’t generally regarded as a time for great discoveries or major premieres. Much of the press has left, and those that remain have become a bit more cavalier about attending screenings; many of them are out shopping for delicate souvenirs and resilient cheeses to take home. At this year’s Venice , when star power was already notoriously hard to come by owing to the ongoing SAG-WGA strike, you could be forgiven for assuming that the party was pretty much over.

But then, here comes Memory , starring Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, one of the few films at this year’s festival allowed to have its stars attend its premiere. Appropriately so, too, because it’s almost entirely their show. Mexican director Michel Franco’s somber drama about the ghosts of the past has a lot on its mind, and not all of it makes sense. But its two leads are so good together, so weirdly right together, that everything slips away and you just watch them.

Perhaps this is all by design. Memory is such a lean work that Chastain and Sarsgaard are allowed to dominate much of the screen, even just physically. She plays Sylvia, a single mother 13 years sober who works at an adult daycare center while raising her teenage daughter, Anna (Brooke Timber). We sense her protectiveness early on with the swiftness and thoroughness she shows in locking her apartment door whenever she steps inside, with the way she watches Anna from across the street during recess at school. When someone comes to repair her fridge, Sylvia notes that she had specifically requested a woman. Chastain makes Sylvia’s simmering anxiety palpable, though in decidedly unshowy fashion. Something clearly broke in her a long time ago, and we sense that she’s spent a lot of time trying to hold it all together and move on.

One night, while attending her high school reunion, Sylvia is silently confronted by a man, Saul Shapiro (Sarsgaard). He says nothing, just sits next to her and stares. She says nothing back, just leaves. He follows her to the subway, then to her apartment. He stands outside her building, and in the morning she finds him curled up among the tires of the auto shop downstairs, shivering and incoherent. She takes his wallet and calls a number. It turns out that Saul suffers from dementia, often forgetting where he is and wandering away from the home in which he lives with his brother (Josh Charles). But Sylvia remembers Saul. In fact, she claims that he was a close friend of the boy who raped her when she was 12. What’s more, she claims that Saul also raped her once. “Do you remember what you used to make me do?” she asks him angrily the next time they meet, “or do you only remember when it’s convenient?” He stares at her blankly. He doesn’t remember a thing.

Here’s where the movie gets interestingly thorny, at least briefly. Sylvia’s sister Olivia (Merritt Wever) informs her that she is, in fact, wrong about Saul – that he started school the year she left and that he couldn’t have done the things she claims he did. This coincides with Saul’s family asking if Sylvia might be willing to help care for him during the day. She agrees, and before we know it, she and this man whom she briefly thought was a monster are suddenly spending a lot of time together. Is it something about his blankness, his gentle acceptance that attracts her? Sylvia’s daughter is getting to that age when she’s starting to rebel against her clearly overprotective mom’s edicts. And now here’s this grown man who will do anything she says, and who clearly loves just being there with her, largely because there’s nothing else he can do.

Franco’s script is so spare that we have relatively little to latch onto – almost as if the film is itself in the process of forgetting certain details. Sylvia’s accusation of Saul is barely discussed once it’s all cleared up, which seems odd for this woman to whom the past feels so resilient, so eternally corrosive. In fact, the movie turns out not to be about their common history at all, but rather their very odd, increasingly loving present.

Luckily, we have these two actors, who when together feel like a chemical reaction come to life. Her tension is transformed by his pleasant pliancy, and vice-versa. Sylvia is burdened by a swirl of memories — most of which we get only hints of — confronted by a man who can’t remember increasingly vast stretches of his life. As their relationship grows in tenderness, we pull for them, even as we sense that something horrifying might be around the corner.

The film is on less firm ground when it actually tries to untangle Sylvia’s past. The inevitable revelations about what happened to her are fairly predictable, though no less harrowing for being so. It does feel at times like Franco wants to resolve these elements quickly and get on with the rest of his movie. There’s a climactic scene in which Sylvia confronts her family that’s riveting in the moment because it’s so well-acted, but its impact dissolves the second you start to think further about it. Even so, this is clearly a film that’s meant to be carried by its leads. And as a showcase for these stars, Memory works superbly.

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‘Memory’ Review: Jessica Chastain Is a Caretaker with Demons in Michel Franco’s Demented Romance

Ryan lattanzio, deputy editor, film.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Venice Film Festival. Ketchup Entertainment releases the film in select theaters on Friday, December 22, with expansion to follow on Friday, January 5.

Michel Franco ‘s “ Memory ” is in the tradition of movies about broken people coming together, with all the heartbreak and melodrama required.

Saul, as we eventually learn, has a form of dementia that alternates between total mental clarity and blackouts that leave him lost. Sylvia (Chastain) is an adult daycare social worker who forms a patchy connection with him after their creepy first encounter, and it turns to love.

Writer/director Franco leaves his heart ajar for perhaps the first time — his prior films, even his most recent “Sundown” about a man (Tim Roth) who abandons his family while on vacation in Mexico at a time of great need, maintain an emotional cool. “Memory,” unlike the rest, is a weepie but still a weepie for those who hate them, as the Mexican filmmaker keeps 10 feet of emotional distance from his characters at all times — until he doesn’t. “Memory” feels like what happens after a typical Michel Franco movie, the worst of the damage already done and out of the way. (No genocide or deus-ex-machina auto deaths here!)

Sylvia lives with her daughter Anna (Brooke Timber) in the waterside Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. She keeps multiple locks and an alarm system affixed to the front door of their two-bedroom apartment, and flinches when a maintenance worker who shows up turns out to be a man and not the woman she asked for. There’s a distrust around men she even reveals in the film’s opening scene, an AA meeting in which Sylvia is celebrating 13 years of sobriety. (Her daughter, who attends also, looks old enough for us to surmise that Sylvia got sober around the time Anna was born.) “You’re the only man who stayed,” she tells her sponsor, jokingly, but it clearly took her years to get to a joke like this without it being laced with pain.

Her suburbs-living sister Olivia (Merritt Wever, who never overwhelms with another effortless performance) encourages Sylvia to attend a Woodbury High School reunion, where people will be drinking. It’s there that a bearded man saunters up to her with a dazed grin. Uncomfortable, Sylvia leaves, but he follows her home on the train and then stands outside her apartment until morning in the rain. The next day, the kindly social worker in Sylvia activates, and she summons a ride to take Saul home to his brownstone in Brooklyn, where he lives with his understandably possessive brother Isaac (Josh Charles). But Sylvia feels some inexplicable pull toward Saul and the next day takes him for a walk in Central Park — Franco has a mostly passive relationship to New York City, with some of the geography not adding up if you’ve lived there long enough to know it.

Meanwhile, dropping in as if from the sky, her estranged mother Samantha (Jessica Harper, and if you’re going to call upon a legendary actress to play a recalcitrant mother from Miami, it should of course be her) re-enters the lives of Olivia and her children. There are concerns that Sylvia has long been lying about childhood sexual abuse, concerns that even Olivia seems to corroborate, however wearily. Samantha’s sudden visibility in their lives isn’t deeply explained by Franco, who tends to keep exposition close to his chest.

But Sylvia and Saul continue to grow closer, and when they finally, nervously kiss outside of Anna’s school, it brings a heartfelt whoosh so unexpected from a director whose debut feature was about coerced sibling incest. You could safely call Sylvia and Saul’s first encounter a kind of demented meet-cute, and the rest of the movie unfolds to the structure of a romantic comedy. Obstacles get in the way, Sylvia volunteers to become his caretaker, what is each of them gaining from this if Saul oftentimes doesn’t know who or where he is? Details emerge to suggest Sylvia lied to Saul in her accusation, but he’s already forgotten them.

Sarsgaard plays Saul with a tentative energy, often vacant-eyed until he snaps into focus, while Sylvia, obviously loveless since sobriety other than her relationship with her daughter, is desperate for some kind of connection with another person even if it interrupts her controlled existence: Go to work, go to the AA meetings, pay the bills, take your daughter to school, push the horrors of yesterday under the proverbial planter in the corner.

But all the actors make such heightened operatic exposing of emotions believable even if the script feels on the nose at this final hairpin turn. The contrivances, as much as they are governed by the laws of melodrama, fall away because veteran performers Chastain and Sarsgaard give a pair of haunting, expert performances as damaged people making sense of their own agony together. Franco gets out of the way of his actors without manipulating them.

There’s an errant moment toward the end that shows Sylvia listlessly vacuuming, Chastain’s red hair flying out of place, alone again. The actress displays an extraordinary understanding of the mechanisms of control an addict must go through to keep out the bad and stay the course. “Memory” has the makings of a play in its hyper-focus on the central dilemma of an alcoholic woman and a mentally ill man trying to love each other.

Chastain has made a point in her career to play only women of inner strength. Sylvia’s isn’t immediate, but it’s there. Watching her hardened outsides come just slightly undone from the inside is as moving as watching Franco’s own do just that as he opens his heart up to caring for the characters he’s created. Is his dark imagination pulling a fast one on us? I don’t think so.

“Memory” premiered at the 2023 Venice Film Festival.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Violent Neeson action thriller is meaty but not memorable.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

It's never too late to do the right thing. But als

FBI agents tirelessly fight to try to bring down a

Law enforcement/FBI teams include characters of co

Intense, graphic, and bloody violence. Frequent gu

Sex workers shown in several scenes. One is seen s

Strong language throughout, including "a--hole," "

Wealth is depicted as a method of power: If you ha

Several characters smoke cigarettes or cigars. Dri

Parents need to know that Memory is a thriller starring Liam Neeson as Alex Lewis, an assassin who's trying to stop a sex-trafficking operation . Alex is experiencing cognitive decline, and as he pivots to helping law enforcement, he begins to be perceived sympathetically -- but despite the movie's…

Positive Messages

It's never too late to do the right thing. But also suggests that if you have money, you're above the law.

Positive Role Models

FBI agents tirelessly fight to try to bring down a sex trafficking ring, even when their efforts are continually thwarted by outside forces. But the story also follows an assassin who's intended to be seen heroically.

Diverse Representations

Law enforcement/FBI teams include characters of color. Long delays at U.S. immigration processing centers are central to the story, and the film shows a Mexican detective working with the FBI to try to stop the child exploitation tied to these problems. Female FBI agent is equally capable as her male counterparts. Sex workers depicted with compassion. A character with cognitive decline is portrayed sympathetically.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Intense, graphic, and bloody violence. Frequent gun use, including high-powered rifles. Physical fighting. Strangling/slit throats. Knifings. Verbal description of murders. Young teen is sex trafficked (and is depicted as seeming OK with it, defending the arrangement and the people putting her up to it), and surveillance footage captures the moments beforehand.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Sex workers shown in several scenes. One is seen sleeping with the main character (with the implication they'd had sex); another with the implication that she's prepping for sex. Full backside male nudity. Suggestive conversation. A woman comes on to someone by pulling her top down; only her shoulders are seen.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language throughout, including "a--hole," "bastard," "bulls--t," "p---y" (used as an insult), and frequent use of "f--k." Threats. "Swear to G-d." Sexual terms like "blowie."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Wealth is depicted as a method of power: If you have money, you're above the law.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Several characters smoke cigarettes or cigars. Drinking throughout. Main character's prescription medication is a plot point, but it's not misused.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Memory is a thriller starring Liam Neeson as Alex Lewis, an assassin who's trying to stop a sex-trafficking operation . Alex is experiencing cognitive decline, and as he pivots to helping law enforcement, he begins to be perceived sympathetically -- but despite the movie's reminder that it's never too late to do the right thing, he's a killer, not a hero. Several hits occur on screen, with the camera lingering on the act and its bloody aftermath -- expect shootings, stabbings, slit throats, explosions, and physical fights. Long delays at U.S. immigration processing centers are central to the story, and the film shows a Mexican detective working with the FBI to try to stop the child exploitation tied to these problems. Sex workers (including a 13-year-old) are depicted compassionately, shown in the moments before and after sex (in one scene, a man's bare backside is seen). Expect smoking, drinking, and strong language ("f--k," "a--hole," etc.) throughout. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In MEMORY (a remake of the 2003 Belgian thriller Memory of a Killer) , aging assassin Alex Lewis ( Liam Neeson ) is ready to retire, but his employer insists that he take one last job. When he realizes he's been hired to kill a teen girl, he refuses to complete the job. This puts a target on his back, and as he learns more about the dangerous criminal organization that hired him -- uncovering a child sex-trafficking ring that's using the difficulties at the U.S. Southern border to their advantage -- Alex decides to put an end to them. Meanwhile, FBI agent Vincent Serra ( Guy Pearce , whose casting is a wink to the memory-impaired character he played in Memento ) and his child exploitation task force feel like they're the only ones who care. But with an inability to produce convictions, the division is being shut down.

Is It Any Good?

While Neeson is playing yet another character who has "a certain set of skills," he does bring nuance to the role of Alex Lewis, an aging assassin who's dealing with cognitive decline. His enlightening performance -- and this unusual angle -- elevates a standard hitman-for-hire story into a thought-provoking one. Are "bad" people just bad, or do they have their own ethical boundaries? And when they decide to do the right thing, should we view them differently? Director Martin Campbell toys with viewers to some degree, allowing us to feel compassion and root for Alex and then slapping us with a cold reminder that he doesn't deserve our warm feelings.

Campbell, who was also behind the James Bond films Casino Royale and Goldeneye , is definitely creating a violent Liam Neeson actioner here, rather than a popcorn 007 flick. The killings are very graphic, and the story upsetting. The director knows what he's doing, and Memory is a well-made film, but some things fall through the cracks, including a few supporting actors whose performances are so bad, they're laugh-inducing. Additionally, opting to make a 13-year-old character who's being trafficked seemingly supportive of the decision to be used as a sex worker is bizarre. The end result is that Memory gives you something to think about for a week or two but is ultimately forgettable.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Memory's violence . How realistic is it? What techniques do filmmakers use to create realistic violence, as opposed to fantasy violence? Which has greater impact?

What does it mean to be complicit? Why is permitting or covering up bad actions also illegal and immoral, even if you're not the one committing the crime?

How can a common cause bring together people who otherwise would never be on the same side? How can we use common ground as a way to reach those who don't share our beliefs or behaviors?

Parents, discuss the realities of human trafficking. If you suspect someone is being exploited, call the National Human Trafficking hotline: (888) 373-7888.

Movie Details

• In theaters : April 29, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : July 5, 2022
• Cast : Liam Neeson , Guy Pearce , Monica Bellucci
• Director : Martin Campbell
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Open Road Films
• Genre : Thriller
• Run time : 114 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : violence, some bloody images and language throughout
• Last updated : September 23, 2022

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Memory Reviews

A challenging, painful, but ultimately hopeful drama of two people afflicted by a loss and a surfeit of memory.

Full Review | Original Score: 4 | Mar 21, 2024

Chastain and Sarsgaard are a class act — their touching, tactile chemistry is the film’s triumph.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 18, 2024

Insinuating and bravely acted, Memory is plotted like a play: there are shades of Florian Zeller’s The Father, albeit with the dementia theme as only one side of the coin here.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 29, 2024

A well-acted but dull entry in the Hollywood suffering sweepstakes, the film features Chastain in a rare onscreen romance... and a curious one it turns out to be, with a particularly tender scene in a bathtub.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 28, 2024

There’s lots of shouting and crying, Chastain and Sarsgaard are eminently watchable, as they always are and the ending is cute, but it also defies logic and any semblance of credibility.

Gradually and delicately, Sylvia and Saul’s tessellating traumas are revealed by a beautifully balanced pair of lead performances – though their happy-ever-after is never assured.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 28, 2024

Franco is kinder to these characters than he has been to many of his creations, leaving the viewer to parse the moral murk.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 24, 2024

Sombre themes then, but this film is beautifully acted, and the tender chemistry between Sarsgaard and Chastain is a joy to behold.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 23, 2024

Memory would be too contrived a work to buy into if it weren’t for the talents of Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 23, 2024

Though it’s too bad the dramatic framework lacks credibility, Chastain and Sarsgaard do heroic work to make it compelling moment to moment.

Franco tells us that the power of love wins the day, however fleeting and fragile it may be.

An intriguing premise there, but Franco’s screenplay is shallow, patchy and relies heavily on stuffy melodrama. Chastain and Sarsgaard deliver, as always, but they deserve a better film.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 22, 2024

…despite the kind of immersive acting one expects from performers like these, Memory is fairly agonising to watch... those with triggers for dementia or sexual abuse depiction may well struggle to cope with the content of the story told here…

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 22, 2024

A tough and draining watch that’s worth enduring for its well-matched leads’ compelling star turns.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 16, 2024

The level of engagement you get from the movie would depend on how much you end up rooting for the central characters. Even if you end up rooting for them, it ends with a feeling that the cycle of separation and reunion could continue.

Full Review | Feb 14, 2024

An acting masterclass from Jessica Chastain. Thanks to her spellbinding performance, this is a film that will linger long in the memories of audiences.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 12, 2024

A well-acted two-hander that made the most out of the two talented leads. Memory is a deeply layered and moving drama about past trauma and finding connection when you least expect it.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 2, 2024

The script rides a fine line between ambiguity and slightness, resulting in audience interpretation of certain scenes in need of clarity. It can feel vague rather than natural to the progression of the characters.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jan 30, 2024

Franco radically turns the rudder to dive us into a story about an impossible love with unpredictable consequences, supported by stupendous performances by Chastain and Sarsgaard. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jan 30, 2024

Memory is a skillfully acted character study of how memories can be blocked out, preserved or warped to shape personal self-identities or perceptions of others. This drama’s sluggish pacing drags down the movie, but it doesn't ruin the film.

Full Review | Jan 29, 2024

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• DVD & Streaming
• Drama , Thriller

Content Caution

In Theaters

• April 29, 2022
• Liam Neeson as Alex Lewis; Guy Pearce as Vincent Serra; Monica Bellucci as Davana Sealman; Ray Stevenson as Detective Danny Mora; Ray Fearon as Special Agent Gerald Nussbaum

Home Release Date

• June 21, 2022
• Martin Campbell

Distributor

• Briarcliff Entertainment

Movie Review

Where did he put the keys? They should be here under the windshield visor. That’s where he always leaves them. He wouldn’t have taken them into the hospital with him. Would he? No, no. That would be crazy. Sloppy. Bad, bad, bad.

They’re not on the seat. Not in his pants pocket. In his shirt! Yes, he put them in his scrubs’ top pocket. That’s right, he was masquerading as an orderly this time. Hospital. Scrubs. Right.

He almost forced himself to retrace his steps back through the lobby and into the room where he garroted his mark’s throat. Blood everywhere. People walking by. Bad. That would have been an amateur mistake. He never makes those. Or … he didn’t.

But things are getting worse.

Alex Lewis has long known that the decline would happen. Alzheimer’s disease has hit his whole family this way. His older brother is little more than an empty … uh, just empty at this point. For Alex, it’s only been little things: a key, a picture, a word, a note. That’s why he’s taken to writing instructions and reminders on his own arm. But for some jobs, like Alex’s, you can’t be plagued with memory loss or the threat of a rubbed-off message.

Killers can’t be losing track of things. Not even keys. In this line of work, it won’t get you fired. It’ll get you dead.

He even tried to quit. But his handler talked him out of it. “Men like us, don’t retire,” he told Alex. But what do you do when you can’t remember the address, the name, the … thingamajig any longer? What then?

Just one more job. Make it a big one. And then he’ll have enough cash to hide himself away somewhere, maybe. He’ll have to leave what’s left of his brother behind. But, hey, soon enough he’ll probably forget him anyway.

Just one last, uh … whatchamacallit. Then he’ll be fine.[ Note: Spoilers are contained in the following sections. ]

Positive Elements

Alex’s next job changes everything, as he’s called upon to kill a teen girl who had been dragged into child prostitution by sex trafficking ring. Obviously, that’s not good. Alex, however, can’t force himself to follow through. But the girl is brutally murdered anyway by someone else. Alex, feeling that he’s close to losing everything anyway, takes it upon himself to hunt down those calling the shots. He also helps an FBI agent named Vincent Serra. Vincent had gone out of his way to help protect the abused girl—who was left homeless after a police sting went wrong.

Both men attempt to bring the powerbrokers behind the much larger trafficking operation to justice. Of course, their methods for doing so are much different. “We all have to die, Vincent. What’s important is what we do before we go,” Alex tells the FBI agent.

Amid a tainted justice system, we see very few good men and women. Vincent is one of a rare breed here.

Spiritual Elements

A Mexican detective wears six St. Mary medals around his neck to remind him of abused and murdered young women that he’s encountered in the course of a human trafficking case.

Someone says a prayer in Spanish and ends it with an affirmative “Amen.”

Sexual Content

We see several different women wearing open shirts or low-cut tops. One of them is in a formfitting swimsuit. Part of Vincent’s investigation into a sexual trafficking ring involves him paying, supposedly, to have sex with a man’s teen daughter. The girl undresses to a lightweight shift, but then discovers that Vincent is wearing a wire when she pulls open his shirt.

Later we see snapshots of that same teen girl being slapped by her father and a short video of her being tossed onto a bed by a shirtless older man. Later still, we see that same man at a yacht party. He strips off his clothes and lays face down on a bed and orders a different teen girl to get undressed. (She’s stopped from doing so.) The party also features an onboard hot tub packed with young women in bikinis.

A wife suspects her husband of an affair and demands he wash off the woman’s perfume. A woman openly flirts with Alex at a bar and later—after Alex slaps down a drunken man rudely hitting on her—the two end up in bed together. We see her in a cleavage-baring slip the next morning.

Violent Content

There’s quite a bit of brawling and death-dealing in this R-rated pic. Alex pounds away at several men in and out of the course of his job. He also breaks a man’s nose with a rifle butt. He batters another guy in a public restroom, smashing the man through a porcelain toilet. He slaps a drunk around at a hotel bar, slamming his head into the bar.

In another scene, Alex beats a killer mercilessly, slamming the man’s head and face into a car mirror and through a window. He then ties the bloodied man into the car and detonates a bomb on the vehicle’s undercarriage. We see him shoot several people in the head, up close and at a distance. He rips open a man’s gushing neck with a wire garrote.

In turn, Alex is also beaten badly by an angry police officer in a police interview. And the guy notes that he’ll take all afternoon to beat a confession out of him.

We’re shown pictures of two young boys with bruises all over their backs. A young girl is battered. We see her later with a bloody bullet hole in her forehead. A woman’s throat is slashed open by a man behind her, and the camera watches her bleed out. An innocent woman is shot in the throat by a gunman. Alex is shot in the side at one point and his shirt soon becomes soaked with blood. He opens his shirt, revealing the wound, then pours vodka on it and lights it afire to cauterize the laceration.

Someone tells a story about his wife getting hit by a drunk driver who then backs up to kill her son so there wouldn’t be any witnesses. A police sniper kills an innocent man. A man is riddled with bullets from police fire. Vincent tumbles out a second story window with an armed man who dies in the fall.

Crude or Profane Language

Some 40 f-words and a dozen s-words are joined by multiple uses of “a–hole” and “h—.” God’s and Jesus’ names are misused seven times total (with God’s name being combined with “d–n” once).

Drug and Alcohol Content

Both Alex and Vincent drink pretty heavily in several separate scenes. We see others drinking champagne, wine and booze at bars and at a yacht party. Vincent and a fellow female agent get drunk at a bar. A man and woman drink shots of tequila. A murder victim’s wife is visibly drunk during a police interview.

Two different guys smoke cigarettes.

Alex regularly takes a prescription medication designed to help his Alzheimer’s disease symptoms. A wealthy woman receives injections of a drug from her private physician. And a doctor moves to give someone a lethal injection before he’s stopped. We’re told of a man who was high on meth.

Other Negative Elements

This film declares that criminal organizations have corrupted many in the high seats of power in the U.S. criminal justice system (and in Washington, D.C.). We see several different people in authority corrupted by money and promises of power. And in the end, it’s suggested that murder may be the only way to solve that systemic disease.

Some might winkingly say that Liam Neeson is yet again playing a hero who has something, ahem, taken from him: this time his memory.

But that’s not accurate, really. In part, that’s because Neeson initially plays a true villain here, albeit someone with a conscience that’s starting to awaken. So when he’s not killing people in the film Memory, he’s straining to give heavy handed aid to the real hero before he loses himself to Alzheimer’s.

We’re shown child sex trafficking and gory murder in a crime-riddled world rotted to the core by graft and power. And it’s all part and parcel of a badly broken and horribly corrupted U.S. justice system.

Does that make for a stark social commentary? Maybe. But it also leaves you stewing in a fairly dark worldview. And no amount of orange soda and Gummy bears will make that depressing and often foul viewpoint any sweeter.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Movie Review – Memory (2023)

February 19, 2024 by Robert Kojder

Memory , 2023.

Written and Directed by Michel Franco. Starring Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Merritt Wever, Josh Charles, Elsie Fisher, Jessica Harper, Brooke Timber, Jackson Dorfmann, Alexis Rae Forlenza, Elizabeth Loyacano, Josh Philip Weinstein, and Mia Mei Williamson.

Sylvia is a social worker who leads a simple and structured life. This is blown open when Saul follows her home from their high school reunion. Their surprise encounter will profoundly impact both of them as they open the door to the past.

When Jessica Chastain’s Sylvia and Peter Sarsgaard’s Saul properly privately converse in Memory for the first time following an uneasy scare the night before where the early onset dementia-stricken latter followed the former home (same subway route and all), she reveals the horrifying reason why she believes he did so. Anyone familiar with writer/director Michel Franco will be bracing themselves for more shock value that may or may not have substance. The filmmaker then spends the next 80 minutes, give or take, subverting those expectations into an emotionally stirring romance born out of their respective conditions and trauma, with quiet, gentle but powerful chemistry between these leads.

Sylvia has suffered from a history of sexual abuse that caused her to become estranged from her mother, Samantha (Jessica Harper), and embedded into a lengthy battle with alcohol addiction that she was able to quell when the birth of her now 13-year-old daughter Anna (Brooke Timber) came. Her mind is faulty in a different way, in where she accuses Saul of being a boy who often helped another boy assault her when they were 17 and she was 12, verbally blowing up on the man as he calmly sits there unaware of what to say, whether it’s because he never actually did these things or he doesn’t remember them. That mystery is cleared up instantly when Sylvia’s sister Olivia (Merritt Wever) looks into some public records and discovers that he didn’t move into the city and enroll there until the year she changed schools.

Meanwhile, Saul’s brother Isaac (Josh Charles) tells Sylvia, who also works at an adult daycare center, that she would make a good caretaker for him and that one will be needed since his daughter Sara (Elsie Fisher) is off to college. Again, when that suggestion comes in, there is that instant hesitation and pause for concern that Michel Franco is only trying to concoct the most grotesque, triggering dynamic imaginable. Even if he had gone that route, Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard probably still would have found something emotionally raw, revealing, and riveting there; that’s how captivating they are on screen together.

Rather than go down that bleak and dour route, Memory not only follows these two characters as they naturally grow closer but how Sylvia’s trauma and past have made her the adult and justifiably overprotective mother she is today. Throughout the film, Anna knows that she shouldn’t even bother asking her mom if she can go to parties or on a date with the boy she likes (even though he regularly visits their house), aware of what the answer will be. One day Anna might understand why and the truth will devastate her (without getting into spoilers, the horrors of her mom’s past are somehow more painful and disturbing than what is mentioned above.) 

Eventually, Sylvia’s mom comes into town, shedding light on the family dynamic in unsettling ways, seemingly having cast aside her daughter because of this past, to the point of nonchalantly taking it out on Anna (she brings gifts for all the grandchildren, but her) while also pretending she loves her daughters and granddaughters equally. She is also manipulating Anna to ask questions about her mom’s past. Simultaneously, Isaac disapproves of how much time Saul wants to spend with Sylvia, dehumanizing him and insisting that he doesn’t know what he is doing because of dementia, which doesn’t seem to be affecting their budding romance at all beyond his inability to process various entertainment mediums (a sad sequence in itself) and wander off while forgetting what he is doing.

The supporting performances from the closest things to villains in Memory could use a bit more nuance. There is also the feeling that the film doesn’t have much of a place to go narratively. Considering how immensely moving the performances are here, that’s not much of a fault. It is compelling watching these characters fall for one another, Anna discovering some horrifying truths about her mother’s past (there is a beautifully tender scene where she comforts her upon learning, with Brooke Timber impressive throughout), a depressing glimpse into how sexual abuse sometimes gets covered up within a family, and whether or not circumstances will allow them to be together.

By the time Sylvia and Saul are embracing one another in a bathtub, following a tense confrontation pressing their heads together, the love is beyond earned, and they are together because no one else can see these two people like they see each other. That’s the specific, beautiful love Memory is about.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check  here  for new reviews, follow my  Twitter  or  Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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Movie Reviews

'la chimera' is marvelous — right up to its most magical ending.

Justin Chang

Carol Duarte and Josh O'Connor in La Chimera . Neon hide caption

Carol Duarte and Josh O'Connor in La Chimera .

The wonderful 42-year-old filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher practices a kind of cinema that I've come to think of as "Italian magical neorealism." She gives us portraits of hard-scrabble lives in poor rural communities, but they're graced by a whimsical, almost fable-like sense of enchantment.

Rohrwacher's 2014 film, The Wonders , was a lyrical drama about a family of Tuscan beekeepers. She followed that in 2018 with Happy as Lazzaro , about a group of sharecroppers on a tobacco farm whose story moves from picaresque comedy to aching tragedy.

'The Wonders' Of Family And Change

Her marvelous new movie, La Chimera , follows in much the same vein, with one key difference. While Rohrwacher has generally worked with non-professional Italian actors, this time she's cast the English actor Josh O'Connor , best known for his Emmy-winning performance as a young Prince Charles on The Crown .

But O'Connor's character here doesn't give off even a whiff of royalty, even if his name is Arthur. When we first meet him, he's asleep on a train bound for his old stomping grounds in Tuscany. He's just been released from prison after serving some time for the crime of grave robbing.

Arthur has a mysterious archeological talent: Wielding a divining rod, he can detect the presence of buried artifacts, many of which date back to the Etruscan civilization more than 2,000 years ago. Arthur works with a group of tombaroli , or tomb raiders, who rely on him to figure out where to dig.

Upon his return, many of those old friends welcome him back with a parade — one of several moments in which Rohrwacher briefly channels the vibrant human chaos of a Fellini film. Arthur is a little reluctant to rejoin his old gang, since they let him take the rap after their last job. But he doesn't seem to have anything else to do, or anywhere else to go. He may be an outsider — his Italian throughout is decent but far from perfect — but it's the only place in the world that feels remotely like home. And O'Connor plays him with such a deep sense of melancholy that it feels almost special when his handsome, careworn face breaks into a warm smile.

It's not immediately clear what Arthur wants; unlike his cohorts, he doesn't seem all that interested in making money off their spoils. The answer turns out to lie in his dreams, which are haunted by a beautiful young woman named Beniamina — the love of his life, whom he's lost under unclear circumstances.

And so Arthur's determination to go underground becomes a metaphor for his longing for an irretrievable past: Beniamina is the Eurydice to his Orpheus, and he wants her back desperately.

Arthur is still close to Beniamina's mother, Flora, played with a wondrous mix of warmth and imperiousness by the great Isabella Rossellini. Her presence here made me think of her filmmaker father, the neorealist titan Roberto Rossellini — a fitting association for a movie about how the past is forever seeping into the present.

One of the pleasures of Rohrwacher's filmmaking is the way she subtly blurs our sense of time. La Chimera is set in the 1980s, but it could be taking place 20 years earlier, or 20 years later. Rohrwacher and her brilliant cinematographer, Hélène Louvart, shot the movie on a mix of film stocks and sometimes tweak the image in ways that evoke the cinematic antiquities of the silent era. As sorrowful as Arthur's journey is, there's a playfulness to Rohrwacher's sensibility that keeps pulling you in, inviting you to get lost in the movie's mysteries.

One of the story's most significant characters is Italia, played by the Brazilian actor Carol Duarte, who works in Flora's household. Italia is a bit of an odd duck with a beguiling bluntness about her, and she might be just the one to pull Arthur out of his slump and get him to stop living in the past.

I won't give away what happens, except to say that La Chimera builds to not one but two thrilling scenes of underground exploration, in which Arthur must finally figure out his life's purpose — not by using a divining rod, but by following his heart. And it leads to the most magical movie ending I've seen in some time, and also the most real.