Critics reviews

Neither the overwrought erotic thriller Chloe (2009) nor the absurd abduction thriller The Captive (2014) made good use of Egoyan's baser impulses, but he finally gets disreputability right with Remember, an ostensibly solemn Holocaust-inspired drama that gradually reveals itself to be an unapologetic exploitation flick. Good taste gets tossed aside in order to make way for batshit insane confrontations.

Remember, as its title plainly suggests, is more than just about the struggle to stave off complete memory loss. Gutman's painstaking attempts to recollect his hazy past presumably serves as a metaphor for the importance of retaining one of the 20th century's most horrific atrocities in the backlog of one's mind. After a while, however, one senses that Egoyan is only interested in using the Holocaust as fodder for carrot-dangling plot contrivances.

Though it dodders engagingly at its antihero's pace, Remember is not subtle, from a bigot's police badge shining the same star shape of a yellow cloth patch to a guilt-ridden final twist that's still only half as preposterous as Sean Penn's Nazi-hunting glam rocker in This Must Be the Place.

Remember boasts more wit and elegance than Chloe (2009) and The Captive (2014), two other Egoyan thrillers that could be just as risible but were far more lugubrious. His new film's relative fleet-footedness has much to do with Christopher Plummer's spry performance as the dementia-afflicted Zev, the man who knew too little.

By turns haunted and defiant in his portrayal of Zev, Plummer is the film's raison d'être and nearly its salvation. But in making senility the engine of the piece and siphoning its heft from the Holocaust, Egoyan manages to trivialize both. His film is as lost and confused as its hero.

First-time screenwriter Benjamin August's script, which appears heavily influenced by Memento, is rich in its exploration of themes relating to remembering, trauma, and memory at both personal and societal levels; but it suffers from too many improbable moments.

Though the film is a long way from the artistic ambitions of "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter," it's a solid genre piece that boasts a number of satisfying plot twists, expert performances (the cast also includes Martin Landau and Bruno Ganz) and sure craftsmanship by Egoyan.

A superfluous denouement aside, Remember is Egoyan's leanest, cleanest film in years, its protagonist's foggy mental state offering a tabula rasa upon which the director can project several of his favoured themes to great effect.

Unusually working from another writer's script, Egoyan strips away the usual self-referential layers of his cinema - so visible in his last feature, baroque thriller The Captive - to offer a spare, to-the-point execution of what is essentially a one-hero drama.

What makes Remember more immediately appealing than [Devil's Knot or The Captive is the way it leaves its mechanisms proudly on display. As Zev closes in on his target you can almost hear the film's clockwork clicking and whirring, until the story finally snaps shut on itself like a trap.

At worst, tyro writer Benjamin August's screenplay is a crass attempt to fashion a "Memento"-style puzzle narrative from post-Holocaust trauma. Toggling variables of disguised identity and dementia, as Christopher Plummer's ailing German widower travels across North America in search of the camp commander he recalls from his time in Auschwitz, the pic is riddled with lapses in logic even before a stakes-shifting twist that many viewers might see coming.