If movies had previous lives, Simeon Halligan’s memory-regression thriller may need been a shiny 90s psychological drama, a Twilight Zone episode, and even a tricksy Hitchcockian voyage. But in the 2020s, it will get to be a serviceable, low-budget Brit-pulp outing that includes Jeremy Piven who, the place different big-name buy-ins may need phoned it in, authoritatively anchors the affair as a superstar hypnotist main a shopper into harmful waters.
Traumatised Manchester journalist Jason (Aneurin Barnard, quickly to be seen because the titular character in Duncan Jones’s Rogue Trooper) is to return to Syria, the place six years earlier he witnessed jihadists slit a colleague’s throat. Probably a dangerous thought then, simply earlier than setting off, to volunteer on reside TV to be hypnotised by Timothy Bevan (Piven), who claims to permit punters to entry previous incarnations. Jason is promptly transported into a scarlet, doorway-lined corridor of horrors; one portal opens on to a scene of a horrific stabbing apparently dedicated by his earlier self. So pregnant spouse Claira (Pixie Lott) presses him to return to Bevan to get this door definitively locked and bolted.
The journalist and the hypnotist successfully play temporal detectives, monitoring down the previous’s serial-killer predecessor from clues, all shot in giallo-tinted prowler-cam (the primary crime scene is on Mangle Street). Halligan’s movie is at its greatest when it subtly layers in creepy subliminals as actuality and reminiscence overlap. Jason’s arthritis compression glove mirrors the killer’s sheathed arms, and the howls of a baleful bluesman herald eerie psychic eruptions in his waking life. A not-so-strange coincidence: the musician can be glimpsed in a poster pinned up on the home of a true-crime podcaster (Nicholas Farrell) consulted by the pair.
Sadly, this energy of suggestion isn’t effectively supported by the pile-up of plot contrivances in the movie’s hokey closing stretch, as Tim McInnerny’s psychology lecturer comes into the body. Nor does the script credibly again up its insinuations that each one this may occasionally even be projection, or a case of false reminiscence. Without true ambiguity surrounding this Mancunian candidate, Barnard is left giving a one-dimensional efficiency, in contrast with the notes of haughty defensiveness with which Piven props up his character. But it stays watchable all through, if not in the identical mesmeric class because the likes of Danny Boyle’s Trance.
