| Complete credited cast: | |||
| Nicole Kidman | ... | ||
| Colin Firth | ... | ||
| Mark Strong | ... | ||
| Ben Crompton | ... |
Warehouse Caretaker
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| Anne-Marie Duff | ... | ||
| Adam Levy | ... |
Ben
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Gabriel Strong | ... |
Boy on Bike
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Flynn MacArthur | ... |
Boy in Dream
(as Flynn Macarthur)
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| Dean-Charles Chapman | ... | ||
Forty-year-old Christine Lucas wakes up in bed with a man she does not know, in an unfamiliar house. The man explains that he is her husband, Ben, and that she suffered brain damage from a car accident ten years earlier. Christine wakes up every morning with no memory of her life from her early twenties onwards. Christine receives treatment from Dr. Nasch, a neurologist at a local hospital who provides her a camera to record her thoughts and progress each day, and calls her every morning to remind her to watch the video in the camera. Soon, she starts to discover the truth around her. Written by Nebzyl
This is a truly ridiculous shock-horror film masquerading as a neo-noir thriller. It is based upon a storyline which is scientifically impossible. We are meant to believe that, having injured her head years before, Nicole Kidman wakes up every morning with amnesia. As she is told in the film: 'You build up a store of memories during the day but then it all disappears when you go to sleep, and you wake up in the morning thinking you are 20 years old with your whole life ahead of you.' There is no such case of fresh amnesia recurring every 24 hours in the entire annals of science or human history. It is all tosh. This film is so phoney and dishonest that it is positively offensive. It is a shallow exploitation film peddling horror and fear for money. It is based upon a novel by someone called S. J. Watson, who I suspect needs his head examined every morning when he wakes up to see if anything is there that makes more sense than this story. The screenplay and the direction are by Rowan Joffe, son of Roland. The film is in my opinion something to be deeply ashamed of, so not much credit there. I cannot comprehend how Colin Firth could lower himself to appear in such a ludicrous film, especially as he wears the same blank expression all the way through the film and no demands of any kind are made upon any of his acting talents. Maybe this was the easiest job he ever had. As for Nicole Kidman, I can understand the possible appeal of the film to her. If perhaps she might be one of those actresses who calculates the percentage of screen time which she can dominate in a film before accepting a role, then this would win every time, for the camera dwells on her so indulgently that a sizeable portion of the film consists of her delivering anguished monologues to the camera, while she glances nervously to right and to left to see if someone is coming who might overhear her. This camp hyping of the paranoia of the film merely makes it more laughable. I would have thought that American audiences are getting paranoia fatigue by now, what with snow blizzards that refuse to come to New York after all, ebola epidemics that just won't spread properly, and all the other 'We are all gonna die!' scenarios with which they are bombarded by the crazed media on a daily basis. But, if Americans don't get enough fear and terror from their news broadcasts, they can always turn to this piece of rubbish to give them an extra 'fix'. This film, with its psychopath, its violence, and its pseudo-psychology, joins THE COUNSELLOR (2014, see my review) in the pile of disgusting spit-outs rotting in the dank corner of the House of Revolting Cinema.