Rising seas have swallowed half of Miami, and the people left behind pay to sink into their own pasts. Reminiscence, the 2021 feature debut of writer-director Lisa Joy, wraps a missing-person mystery inside a science-fiction romance, with Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson at its center.
What is Reminiscence about?
Nick Bannister is a former soldier who runs a small, half-legal business in a waterlogged near-future Miami: clients lie back in a tank, and his equipment lets them experience a chosen memory again, exactly as it was. The service is popular in a city where the present offers little worth staying awake for. A woman named Mae walks in one evening with a mundane request, and what should have been a single session grows into a relationship that fills Nick's days. Then she vanishes without explanation. Unable to let go, Nick begins using his own machine to comb through what he remembers of her, and a memory belonging to an unrelated client suggests that Mae was tangled up in a string of violent crimes across the city. The film follows his search through flooded streets, corrupt power brokers and the unreliable footage of his own mind, as he tries to decide whether the woman he loved ever existed as he pictured her.
About the cast
Hugh Jackman heads the cast, joined by Rebecca Ferguson, with whom he had previously shared the screen. Thandiwe Newton, Daniel Wu, Cliff Curtis, Angela Sarafyan, Natalie Martinez and Mojean Aria complete the principal ensemble. The performances lean toward the hushed, weary register of classic noir rather than blockbuster spectacle.
Context & significance
Lisa Joy came to Reminiscence after co-creating and writing for a prominent science-fiction television series, and the same preoccupations carry over: memory as recorded data, the ethics of replaying a life, and technology that promises comfort while quietly hollowing people out. The setting is a Miami reshaped by climate change, where the wealthy have retreated to dry land and everyone else moves through the city by boat and at night, because daytime heat has become unbearable. Stylistically the film borrows from hard-boiled detective fiction of the 1940s: a voice-over narrator, a woman who arrives with a secret, and a plot built from flashbacks. Running 116 minutes, it is a United States production in the mystery, romance, science-fiction and thriller genres. On release it drew a mixed reception, with admirers praising the visual design and the concept, and detractors finding the story familiar. For K-Time viewers it sits comfortably alongside other moody, idea-driven genre films in the catalogue.
Watching Reminiscence on Ktime
Reminiscence streams on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so viewers can choose between hearing the dialogue in Farsi or following the original English performances with translated text. Reading this page is open to everyone; to press play you will need to sign in to a K-Time account. The interface is built in Farsi for the Iranian diaspora, which makes browsing the rest of the catalogue straightforward.