Based on the 2005 novel of the same name by author Tom McCarthy, we meet the unlucky protagonist Tom (Tom Sturridge), who is walking the streets of London minding his own business, when he’s struck from a falling object sent flying from a skyscraper, leaving him in a coma.
Although once he wakes up he’s got a cushy multi-million dollar settlement waiting for him to sort out. This payment comes at a price, as he’s lost his memory and is struggling to piece his own life back together.
He has blips of memories here and there, and uses his new fortunes to hire a “fixer” named Raz (Arsher Ali) to reconstruct elements of his past in order to help re-stimulate his mind in order to try to remember whatever glimpses of his past that are just out of his grasp.
He becomes obsessed, going so far as to rent out an entire block of apartments, and hire actors to play the roles of the people that he sees in his recollections of the past. He becomes obsessed with these recreations, to the point where he puts others at risk of danger with no mind, as long as it brings him closer to some semblance of truth of his former existence.
I wanted to like Remainder a lot more than I did, as is does have some great things working for it, such as the more than capable Tom Sturridge who does a great job carrying this bizarre flick. Fast does the best he can with the oddball material, but there’s a murkiness to the film and characters that prevented me from connecting to any of it.
Remainder is a bit too puzzling and out there for coherence, and never quite fully has a payoff, unless you consider its “oh, of course” plot twist ending that is pretty much the equivalent of a snake eating its own tail.
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