One of the best films of the year. A masterpiece.
Sylvia is a disability support-worker, living in a run-down part of town, with young teenage daughter Anna. Sober for 13 years, since her daughter’s birth, she still attends AA regularly, and tries to keep the demons of the past at bay. One night she accompanies a friend to a high school reunion, and is followed home by Saul, a man she vaguely remembers from school. When she finds him still outside her door the next morning, asleep under a piece of plastic and confused, she realises something is very wrong. So begins the intertwining of two individuals, both struggling with memory in different ways.
Mexican director and writer Michel Franco has crafted a film that is perfect in nearly every detail. An intelligently under-written screenplay sits as the foundation for assured direction and masterful acting. Jessica Chastain as Sylvie and Peter Sarsgaard as Saul both put in career-zenith performances. Their work both as individual actors, and together, is a joy to watch. Casting by Susan Shopmaker deserves an ovation in itself. Supporting characters are played by Josh Charles, Brooke Timber, and the wonderful Jessica Harper. Sylvie’s clients in the supported living facility are played by real people.
Franco knows how to work with actors. He gives them the space and time in which to develop their characters. He rushes nothing. Intimate scenes are real and vulnerable. The whole film feels almost improvised, giving it a level of immediacy and authenticity rare in recent films. Here are some big, big issues: familial abuse, mental illness, dementia, parenthood, and love. And yet Franco manages to keep it all contained and personal.
Memory is intensely moving, gripping, and uncompromising, yet retains a warmth and gentle humour throughout. It is unfaultable.
This is surely one of the best films of 2024.
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