Nick (Hugh Jackman) runs a service along with his longtime work partner, Watts (Thandiwe Newton), that gives people the opportunity to travel back, briefly, reliving happier, sunnier times. When Nick falls for the mysterious lounge singer Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), he finds himself savouring the present over the past but when she disappears, he uses this technology to figure out where she might be.

The reminders of Inception become so distracting that the film starts to border on pastiche. A device that allows for mind travel – check, an old song used for memory recall – check, the ghost of a beautiful but damaged woman haunting our hero – check, an oft-quoted line repeated by the hero about a journey – check, a tortured relationship between a rich man and his son – check. It’s overwhelming, even suffocating at times, which is a shame because there are elements here that work independently, without the need for the Nolan playbook to be so obsessively followed. For a while, Jackman’s grizzled noir schtick is fun enough and the big, expensive slickness of the film surrounding him is inventively designed. The world of the film is often confusingly built but it’s aesthetically powerful, a version of Miami that’s believably waterlogged with people choosing to live nocturnally as the days are too hot.

But the film’s big romance is less sizzle and more fizzle. The pair’s chemistry, shown over just a few scenes, is as wet as the Miami streets, and while Ferguson gives good femme fatale, she can’t quite convince as a down-on-her-luck lounge singer with a secret addiction – the actor is far too refined to nail that sort of grit. The dialogue is often stilted, going through the motions rather than gliding, and what Joy seems to think is a labyrinthine plot is actually rather disappointingly straightforward. The reveals are thunderingly obvious replays, often relying on characters’ great stupidity not to spot them first time around, and as Joy reveals that her box of tricks is actually kind of empty, we start to clock-watch rather than care about what’s in front of us.

There are, of course, many poignant things to say about how some of us choose to relive the past until it slowly breaks us in the present, how moving on can seem more impossible than continually going back, despite our awareness of the self-masochism of such nostalgia. But there’s nothing revelatory or even heart-grabbingly resonant here. File under: if you loved Inception then you’d just about tolerate Reminiscence.

– Compilation