GamesRadar+ Verdict

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

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A woman who can’t forget meets a man who can’t remember in a thorny drama from Mexico’s Michel Franco that is bleak, sad and hopeful in equal measure. Both a showcase for two superb performances and a complex meditation on how the past shapes the present, Memory is also a romance in which two damaged souls forge an unlikely connection in the face of unresolved trauma and mental deterioration.

Care worker Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) is a recovering alcoholic whose life revolves around her job, her sobriety and teenage daughter Anna (Brooke Timber). When a high-school reunion ends with a fellow attendee following her home, her well-ordered existence gets disconcertingly disrupted.

The man she awakes to find still slumped on her doorstep is Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), a widower living with early onset dementia who may or may not be one of the classmates who assaulted Sylvia when she was a teenager. An offer from Saul’s niece (Eight Grade’s Elsie Fisher) to step in as his carer might be a chance for Sylvia to exact retribution – if only she could be as sure of her recollections as Saul is as shorn of his.

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Chastain and Sarsgaard make a riveting duo in a film that – like Franco’s Tim Roth double Chronic and Sundown before it – is in no great hurry to elucidate its mysteries. An electrifying late confrontation between Sylvia and her estranged mother (Jessica Harper) offers a degree of clarity, however, while the ending does at least contain a glimmer of hard-won optimism.

Memory is in US theaters now and in UK cinemas from February 23.

For more upcoming movies, here are all of the 2024 movie release dates on the way.

Neil Smith is a freelance film critic and writer who contributes regularly to Heat, SFX and Screen International. He's a long-time member of the London Film Critics’ Circle and was a contributing editor at Total Film for many years.