Memory: early-onset dementia and past traumas complicate a new relationship in Michel Franco’s warmest film to date

Early on in Michel Franco’s new film Memory, Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) leaves a school reunion, at which she’s clearly felt uncomfortable and isolated, to return to the Brooklyn apartment that she shares with her teenage daughter Anna. As Sylvia undertakes her journey home she’s followed by a man we glimpsed in long shot at the party and whose actions – leaving the dance floor to sit next to her – clearly motivated her abrupt departure. By this point in the film, we know a few details about Sylvia’s life: that she works at an adult daycare centre, that her relationship with her daughter is close but perhaps overprotective, and that she’s a recovering alcoholic who’s been sober for over a decade. What we don’t know is the nature of her relationship with the man who’s following her, and who’s still outside her apartment the next morning.

The sequence provides a good example of the way in which Franco’s film subverts a viewer’s expectations. What looks like the prelude to a drama about stalking becomes something else when Sylvia’s pursuer turns out to be Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), a gentle man who is suffering from early-onset dementia. Later, when Sylvia confronts Saul with an accusation about their shared past, Franco appears to be setting the scene for a morally complicated revenge thriller. But Memory morphs yet again when Sylvia’s recollection of this aspect of the past proves faulty, and her relationship with Saul develops into one of connection and love.

From his first feature, Daniel & Ana (2009), through 2012’s After Lucia, to the controversial vision of Mexican class warfare in New Order (2020), Franco’s films have often explored trauma and family dysfunction. With a protagonist who has suffered serial sexual abuse, Memory is no exception in this regard. But what distinguishes it from Franco’s earlier work, which has sometimes seemed calculated in its pitilessness, is its more redemptive tone. Although it retains the austere formal features that have distinguished Franco’s filmmaking – static long shots, no non-diegetic music – Memory is by far the writer-director’s warmest work to date. Returning to a North American setting, this film also picks up the theme of care-giving from his 2015 film Chronic, but in the service of a love story between a woman still reckoning with her past and a man struggling to remember his.

Much of the quiet power of Memory must be credited to Chastain and Sarsgaard. Since Franco’s script is frugal to a fault with character information (we learn nothing whatsoever about the identity of Anna’s father or Sylvia’s relationship with him, for instance), the actors must make every small detail count. Often placed at the centre of the frame, Chastain conveys Sylvia’s need for control and routine through tense, self-protective body language and sometimes clipped responses; her every gesture is expressive. Bearish here, and with his quiet voice full of feeling, Sarsgaard – who won the Volpi cup at Venice Film Festival in 2023 for his performance – brings a befuddled grace and almost uncanny sweetness to Saul, along with a palpable need to express and receive love.

To some extent, the film sentimentalises dementia – Saul shows frustration only in interactions with his brother Isaac (Josh Charles), who the film depicts, uncharitably, as an oppressive force. But Saul and Sylvia’s growing affection is subtly charted through their daily interactions, with the moving use of Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ – a song connected to Saul’s past – as a leitmotif. The couple’s first kiss is one of the loveliest of recent screen kisses; a later love scene is also convincing in its mix of awkwardness and passion.

Despite well-judged work from Brooke Timber and Merritt Wever as Sylvia’s daughter and sister respectively, the sketchiness of Franco’s script serves some characters poorly; Jessica Harper struggles to humanise her role as the estranged mother in denial about her daughter’s painful past and her own complicity in it. An inevitable scene of family confrontation gains impact from its tableau-like framing rather than its revelations. The question of Sylvia’s reliability – raised early on when she makes an incorrect accusation about Saul, but clearly meant to be dismissed later when her mother accuses her of habitual lying – is also a jarring aspect. Nonetheless, with its muted, autumnal palette and everyday New York locations, Memory achieves a high level of realism scene by scene. Refreshingly, there is little fashionable about the film, which suggests a throwback to the more sincere strands of 1990s US indie cinema, and to which Chastain and Sarsgaard bring a rare and bracing intimacy.

► Memory is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from 23 February. Find your nearest screening here.