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Amnesiac Review

By David Kempler

Forget About It

Michael Polish's "Amnesiac" takes pieces of other films and comes up with a hybrid version of one of them. Yeah, I know that doesn't tell you much of value, but to be more specific would ruin it for you.

In what turns out to be a flashback, we see a young married couple in a car, their teenage daughter asleep in the backseat. The man, played by Wes Bentley, turns around to look at his daughter. She wakes up and screams at what she sees. Then the car crashes.

Now, the scene shifts to a large, mostly empty room with a bed in the middle. The father is unconscious in the bed and his wife, played by Kate Bosworth, is ministering to his needs. She speaks in hushed tones, something she does for the entire film, to the point where I wanted to shake her until she spoke at a level like other human beings.

Amnesiac.jpg

As her husband starts regaining consciousness, he too whispers all of his dialogue, but he has no idea who he is. For a minute or two, it would be an effective technique. For an entire film, it's annoying. The other odd part of it is how Michael Polish uses light. Almost everything is bathed in shadows, resulting in an air of mystery bordering on impending horror.

"Amnesiac" finally picks up some speed in the second half when Polish starts unraveling some of the mysteries and misdirections he has thrown at the audience. Unfortunately, by then it's too late to save the film in its entirety. Polish does a nice job at twisting and un-twisting the plot as the end nears, and Bosworth's mechanical performance works much better in the last half-hour. "Amnesiac" isn't bad, but you won't remember it for long.

What did you think?

Movie title Amnesiac
Release year 2015
MPAA Rating NR
Our rating
Summary A man wakes up after being in a car accident, but he doesn't know who he is or much of anything else. Ironically forgettable.
View all articles by David Kempler
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