Reminiscence opens on a city that should not work and somehow does: a Miami half-swallowed by the sea, its boulevards turned to canals, its survivors awake only after dark because the daytime heat has become unliveable. Into this drowned, neon-lit world Lisa Joy drops a man who makes his living selling people their own pasts. Nick Bannister runs an immersion tank that lets clients climb back inside their happiest memories and live them again, frame by frame — and the film’s first, best idea is that a man who deals in other people’s nostalgia is the one most likely to become a junkie for his own.

That man is Hugh Jackman, working in the lower, sadder register he reaches for when he wants to be taken seriously, and the woman who undoes him is Rebecca Ferguson‘s Mae — a lounge singer who walks into his shop to find a lost set of keys and walks out with his whole equilibrium. When she vanishes, Bannister does the one thing his profession makes catastrophically easy: he goes back into the tank and replays her, again and again, hunting the seam where memory curdles into evidence. Around that obsession Joy assembles a thriller of corrupt cops, a drug baron and a dynasty of land barons growing rich off the flooded ground, with Thandiwe Newton‘s ex-soldier Watts watching her partner sink.

A world built better than the story inside it

This is Joy’s feature directorial debut, and it carries the DNA of the show she created with Jonathan Nolan — Westworld — right down to composer Ramin Djawadi, whose score gives the film a melancholy, music-box grandeur. The craft is the real event here. Cinematographer Paul Cameron shoots the sunken city as a Prohibition-era noir that happens to be underwater: dancers in flooded ballrooms, interrogations conducted waist-deep, a courtroom of memory rendered as literal architecture you can walk through. Few science-fiction films of its year built a place this fully imagined, this physically convincing, this beautiful to simply sit inside.

Where it loses the thread

And then the screenplay has to carry it, and the screenplay is where Reminiscence keeps slipping under. Joy narrates almost everything in hard-boiled voiceover, as if she does not quite trust her own gorgeous images to do the talking, and the mystery they wrap turns out to be a fairly standard noir of blackmail, a missing woman and a powerful family — territory mapped long ago by The Maltese Falcon and re-mapped, more thrillingly, by Chinatown. The metaphysics of the memory machine promise something stranger and more vertiginous, an Inception-grade puzzle box, but the film rarely lets the device bend reality the way the premise dangles; it stays a clever way to deliver flashbacks rather than a true engine of dread. Ferguson is a genuine, sophisticated femme fatale and Jackman commits fully to the heartbreak, yet Newton — quietly the most interesting presence on screen — is handed too little, and the resolution arrives more wistful than earned.

What lingers, looking back, is the ache of a film that had everything it needed except a script worthy of its design. It was a commercial failure on release and the reviews ran cool, and the verdict was not unfair: this is a mid-tier mystery dressed in top-tier clothes. But the clothes are extraordinary, and the central conceit — that the cruellest addiction is to a happiness you can rewind but never re-enter — is a genuinely poignant one, even when the plot keeps interrupting it.

Watch Reminiscence for the sunken Miami you will not see anywhere else, for Djawadi’s mournful score, and for Jackman and Ferguson finding real feeling in a machine built for it. Expect, though, the particular frustration of a debut that dreams in images and then explains itself in words — a beautiful place to get lost in, telling a story that never quite earns the time you spend there.