Franco’s first English-language film features nuanced and quietly affecting performances from Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, as it explores the unlikely encounter between a man suffering from the onset of memory loss and a woman with unresolved trauma.

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Like Bas Devos’ underrated Here (2023), this is one of those quietly affecting films where its greatest strength lies in the subtlety of its filmmaking.  With Memory, writer-director Michel Franco has made not just his first English-language film but also something that is out of his usual ‘(dis)comfort zone’. 

One of Mexico’s most fascinating auteurs operating today, Franco is best known for the radical and controversial New Order (2020) but he adopts a more functional style here—nothing quite stands out in terms of its visual composition or sound design, but there is a sense of grounded reassurance that permeates the frames that Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard gracefully populate. 

They are both a calming presence, playing characters that in another film would have been tempted by histrionics.  Chastain is Sylvia, a single mother who is stalked by a stranger after a late night out at a high school reunion. 

“Do you remember things that happened a long time ago?”

Sarsgaard is Saul, that strange man who is suffering from the onset of memory loss, and so Franco, in a remarkably inconspicuous way, brings two unlikely persons together in an ever-deepening and emotional encounter that feels more and more natural as the minutes tick by. 

Sarsgaard won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, but this is an award that is as much his as it is Chastain’s—both are superlative playing ‘damaged’ characters who have been marginalised in little (and disturbing) ways by their family. 

Saul faces the prospect of a life without meaning when all he holds (and will hold) dear will one day fade away; on the other hand, Sylvia is tremendously pained by an unresolved trauma from her past, dreadful memories that can never fade away. 

So, this commingling of differing psychological fates is imbued with a burden far too great for any one person to handle, but Memory posits a way out—it takes two hands to clap; similarly, it takes two souls to heal one another.  But can they, when the world around them is filled with poisoned minds?

Grade: A-

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