Reminiscence trailer: Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson take you on a mind-bending adventure
Westworld producer and screenwriter Lisa Joy is at it again. This time, she has plunged into feature filmmaking, and her latest ambitious project Reminiscence, starring Hugh Jackman, doesn’t seem like a walk in the park. The film’s premise is a dark, yet absorbing one: What happens when you vanish into your memories?
We are introduced to a Miami that is broken down, flooded due to rising water levels. People here rely on nostalgia to escape reality. Jackman plays Nick Bannister, a P.I. who uses rather old technology to help customers revisit their past. However, his world is turned upside down, when he meets a woman who has a secret. He is swept into an adventure that will change him forever. The trailer promises a film that is a blend of romance as well as sci-fi.
The film’s official synopsis reads, “Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman), a private investigator of the mind, navigates the darkly alluring world of the past by helping his clients access lost memories. Living on the fringes of the sunken Miami coast, his life is forever changed when he takes on a new client, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson). A simple matter of lost and found becomes a dangerous obsession. As Bannister fights to find the truth about Mae’s disappearance, he uncovers a violent conspiracy, and must ultimately answer the question: how far would you go to hold on to the ones you love?”
Reminiscence also stars Thandiwe Newton, Daniel Wu, Cliff Curtis, Angela Sarafyan, Natalie Martinez, and Marina de Tavira. Warner Bros. will release the film in theatres and on HBO Max.
Reminiscence Trailer: Hugh Jackman Looks for Rebecca Ferguson in Westworld Co-Creator’s First Movie
The Reminiscence trailer is here. Set in a dystopian near future with rising water levels flooding cities, mankind has created technology that allows people to fully immerse themselves in their past experiences, making them feel as real as real life. It’s in this setting that we follow a moody Hugh Jackman playing a “private investigator of the mind” who takes his clients on a “journey through memory”. That description and the trailer feel a bit like Inception, which is a little funny because Reminiscence is the feature-length directorial debut for Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy, whose brother-in-law incidentally is Inception writer-director Christopher Nolan.
Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) walks into Nick Bannister’s (Jackman) office late one night, and you can tell he’s instantly fallen in love. And how can you not, it’s Ferguson — of Mission: Impossible fame — looking so dreamy after all. And if you need any immediate clue where this is going, just look at Ferguson’s red dress from one of her memories, a clear as day sign that she’s the femme fatale. Nick explains how this world came to be, giving us a glimpse at his past with Mae. “Nothing is more addictive than the past,” he adds, as his co-worker (Thandiwe Newton) pulls him out of the machine. Why is he looking through their past? Well, Mae has since vanished.
Naturally, she has become a lot more than a client for Nick — it’s an obsession — and he realises that he must dig through her past to find out where she’s gone. Turns out she has a dark past that he didn’t know much about. At one point, he mutters to himself: “Was she running from the past? Or racing back towards it?” Said mysterious past seemingly has ties to a character played by Daniel Wu. In another scene, an unseen actor tells Nick: “You think you want answers, but you don’t.” As Nick continues his search regardless, things get more and more serious, with folks threatening to stab him with needles or even outright shoot him.
In addition to Jackman, Ferguson, Newton, and Wu, Reminiscence also stars Cliff Curtis, Marina de Tavira, Mojean Aria, Brett Cullen, Natalie Martinez, Angela Sarafyan, and Nico Parker. Behind the scenes, Joy is directing off a script she wrote herself. Joy is also a producer on Reminiscence alongside fellow Westworld co-creator and husband Jonathan Nolan, Michael De Luca, and Aaron Ryder. The first-time movie director has brought on several Westworld collaborators, including director of photography Paul Cameron, production designer Howard Cummings, editor Mark Yoshikawa, and composer Ramin Djawadi. Reminiscence is a production of Joy and Nolan’s Kilter Films, Michael De Luca Productions, and FilmNation Entertainment. Warner Bros. Pictures is the distributor.
Reminiscence will release August 20 in cinemas worldwide and on HBO Max.
Reminiscence poster
The official Reminiscence poster
Photo Credit: Warner Bros.
Reminiscence trailer promises sci-fi noir from Westworld creator Lisa Joy
In an era dominated by familiar IP, this summer’s Reminiscence promises to be a breath of fresh air. Or a hyperventilating gasp, based on the tense first trailer.
Marking the directorial debut of Westworld creator Lisa Joy, Reminiscence stars Hugh Jackman as private investigator Nick Bannister, who solves his clients’ mysteries by clearing their brain fog. In his near-future world, military-approved technology allows the curious to plug in and reenter their faded memories with absolute clarity. But after assisting his client Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) in finding her keys (yes, really), Nick’s job takes a romantic turn — and then a disastrous one, when she goes missing. Thandiwe Newton co-stars as Nick’s partner, while Daniel Wu pops up in a murkier role.
“We’re going on a journey through memory,” Jackman says in the trailer, in a meditative noir voice. “All you have to do is follow my voice.”
In a preview event for the trailer, Joy explained that the idea for the film came to her after the convergence of two experiences: the birth of her first child, and the hope of savoring those early sense memories forever; and a trip to Slaithwaite, England, after her father’s death, in which she packed up all of his belongings, and realized he had a photo of a woman he met during a war, whom he never met again, but also never forgot.
“Something about her made such an impression that it made him name his house after her, and he kept the photo,” Joy said. With this film, for all this action-thriller grandeur, Joy said she hoped to explore the moments that pass by, that change us, and the idea of “how nice it would be to go back to those memories fully, and feel the way you felt when you experienced them.”
As with Westworld, there’s also plenty of catnip for fans of speculative science fiction. Nick’s memory-jumping machine was inspired by a fact Joy picked up way back in science class, when she learned that touching certain neurons during brain surgery would help patients relive memories. And the film takes place in a futuristic Miami that has built walls to keep out the rising tides of climate change — an infrastructure move that’s literally being debated right now.
“When the waters began to rise, and war broke out, nostalgia became a way of life,” Jackman says in the trailer. “There wasn’t a lot to look forward to. So people began looking back. Nothing is more addictive than the past.”
Reminiscence hits theaters and HBO Max on Sept. 3.