Hugh Jackman in his latest film “Reminiscence” will take you on a journey through your memories — even if there’s a past you’d be best served to forget.
“Reminiscence” comes from director and writer Lisa Joy, who co-created “Westworld” and cast Jackman as “a private investigator of the mind,” someone who helps his clients access lost memories and relive them and their emotions. But he soon becomes obsessed with the past when he takes on a new client and tries to find the truth about a woman’s disappearance.
“Nostalgia became a way of life. There wasn’t a lot to look forward to,” Jackman’s character says in the film. “Nothing is more addictive than the past.”
Though it sounds like it has traces of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Joy in a press event on Wednesday said “Reminiscence” was inspired shortly after the death of her grandfather and her desire to understand how nice it would be to go back and feel exactly the way you felt when you first experienced those memories. She described caring for her daughter and wishing she could bottle her specific smell, knowing that she’d never be able to recreate that specific moment.
“It’s those small moments that mean everything,” Joy said. “How much of life that we value is in those small moments?”
But she admitted that though the film has sweet and sobering roots, “Reminiscence” is a script filled with action, thrills and film noir elements.
The movie is also set in the near future in which Miami has now been flooded and people live inside walls of the sunken Miami coast, with the entire society now turning nocturnal and sleeping when the sun is out for just a few hours each day. In the aftermath of the flooding, a war broke out that now leads people to look back on the past rather than a doubtful, miserable future.
Also starring in “Reminiscence” are Rebecca Ferguson, Thandiwe Newton and Daniel Wu. The film is debuting both in theaters and on HBO Max from Warner Bros. on August 20. Check out the first trailer above.
