Critics reviews

“Memory” is a skillfully acted character study of how memories can be blocked out, preserved, or warped to shape personal self-identities or perceptions of others.

Starring Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard in performances worth treasuring, "Memory" slowly builds its way into your mind and heart.

Memory is something of a surprise. For starters, it's fascinating to see how well-known American actors like Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard adapt to [Franco's] more detached style of filmmaking. And while his touch is as clinical and somber as ever, there's a sense of tenderness and even optimism here that feels new to his work.

But strong as Memory is on a scene-to-scene basis, it’s also got a somewhat credulity-straining, overloaded agenda as a whole.

[A] contrived drama... [Chastain and Sarsgaard's] work in this artsified slab of exploitation cinema is strong enough that you wish their characters would run off to an entirely different movie.

Though it is not easily categorizable, “Memory” is a thoughtful journey featuring very fine performances from both Chastain and Sarsgaard... While there are moments of levity to break up the anguish, it could also come with a laundry list of trigger warnings as it explores difficult subjects from sexual abuse to mental illness in pretty unsatisfactory ways.

This is a film in which characters make questionable and sometimes troubling choices right up until the final scene, and yet we understand why they do the things they do, and we root fiercely for things to work between them.

More directly than [Franco's] previous films, his penchant for long takes with minimal intercutting seeds an emotional suspense, for us as well as the fragile humans inside cinematographer Yves Cape’s cool, steady frame... There are whole areas of this twosome’s bond that remain unexplained. Ultimately, that feels like a virtue of the movie, rather than a flaw.

“Memory” isn’t a pure puzzle box. Told through a humanist lens, it never resorts to simple sentimentality... [It knows] know that even if a person is damaged, whether emotionally or psychologically, that shouldn’t negate them from receiving the kind of support that doesn’t belittle them but treats them with a dignity that goes beyond their trauma.

Mexican director Michel Franco’s somber drama about the ghosts of the past has a lot on its mind, and not all of it makes sense. But its two leads are so good together, so weirdly right together, that everything slips away and you just watch them.

Unlike his English language debut, Chronic (2015)... Memory surprises in how Franco’s calibration seems more attuned to characterization this time around rather than recording their reactionary responses to harrowing traumas.

With Memory, Franco offers a film that feels intentionally pared down, muted in color and in dramatic incident. But in this restraint, he’s able to richly arrange moments of subtle complexity, textured by both pleasure and pain, joy and grief, victory and defeat.