Memory review: Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard rise above this film’s contrived misery

Memory would be too contrived a work to buy into if it weren’t for the talents of Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard. Directed by Mexico’s Michel Franco – a light provocateur known for his cool-headed portraits of violent retribution against the wealthy – it’s a romantic drama of sorts, in which affection becomes secondary to suffering.

Chastain plays Sylvia, a care worker in a facility for disabled people. We first meet her at Alcoholics Anonymous, where she’s celebrating 13 years of sobriety by introducing to the group her teenage daughter, Anna (Brooke Timber). Sylvia’s life is comfortable, if cyclical and stagnant, chopped into listless pieces by Franco and his co-editor, Oscar Figueroa. But the signs of trouble are there: she seems uneasy around her sister, Olivia (Merritt Wever), and compulsively attached to a routine of home alarms and door locks. She denies her daughter’s most basic requests for independence, and rifles through her bedroom drawers.

So, when she’s browbeaten into attending a school reunion, unease spills almost naturally into outright terror when a man, Saul (Sarsgaard), sidles up to her seat. She heads home. He follows her back, all the way to her front door, and stays there until morning, resting limply on a pile of spare tyres from the garage next door.

Here begins Franco’s rolling series of revelations, a buffet of traumas served up for the benefit of narrative intrigue. It turns out Saul’s motivations were entirely innocent – as his brother Isaac (Josh Charles) explains, he has early-onset dementia. It manifests largely, for now, in erratic incidents of confusion and disorientation.

However, there’s a reason Olivia was so jumpy with him, and an accusation is introduced and then dismissed, in order to make way for even further trauma. The camera holds back in order to watch her, from afar, as she sobs in the middle of a park or in the living room after she’s confronted by her estranged and controlling mother (Jessica Harper).

Memory is eventually able to surpass all that calculated misery. Chastain and Sarsgaard invest much in the fragile connection that Olivia and Saul eventually build, and find something much more poignant between them. Saul’s dementia has left him with little of his present but much of his past – of his childhood and his long-deceased wife. In a sense, he still lives there. Sarsgaard shifts sensitively between the energised way he talks about his lost love and the subsequent shutdown his mind experiences when he’s forced to confront the fact she’s gone.

Olivia, too, is stuck, albeit for very different reasons. Chastain allows the grief of a lost girlhood to twist her body inwards, to keep it taut and perpetually on the defence. When Olivia and Saul’s timid flirtations inevitably ease into physical passion, the actors move with such innocence and desperation that it’s hard not to be touched – here are two people whose minds struggle to see what’s before them, daring to hope that there’s still something to build upon. Together, both actors rise above the most blatant of Memory’s manipulations.

Dir: Michel Franco. Starring: Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Merritt Wever, Brooke Timber, Elsie Fisher, Josh Charles, Jessica Harper. Cert 15, 99 minutes

‘Memory’ is in cinemas from 23 February