Film Review | Remainder

Directed by | Omer Fast
Produced by | Natasha Dack, Malte Grunert
Written by | Omer Fast
Starring | Tom Sturridge, Cush Jumbo, Ed Speleers, Arsher Ali, Shaun Prendergast, Adrian Schiller, Nicholas Farrell, Laurence Spellman, Jumayn Hunter
Run Time | 103 minutes
Certificate | 15

Plot |  Tom (Tom Sturridge) is an amnesiac recovering from a mysterious freak accident. He uses the compensation payout to pay fixer Naz (Arsher Ali) to create expensive reconstructions of his fragmented memories.

Review | Omer Fast’s first feature film is an interesting adaption of Tom McCarthy’s 2005 debut novel of the same name.

Our introduction to Tom Sturridge’s character is swift, and with no small element of mystery. While waiting to hail a cab, something or someone catches his eye. Before this can be explored further, Tom is crushed by some sort of debris falling from the sky. The remaining scenes in the prologue let us know that Tom unexpectedly awoke some time later from a near-vegetative state, and he subsequently accepts a whopping payoff to keep quiet about the accident.

Tom discovers that certain innocuous events trigger memories thought lost due to the accident. This, combined with his £8.5 million leads him to decide to try and recreate his fragmented memories on a large scale. Fixer Naz is hired to make it all happen.

There are definitely aspects of Remainder that echo that of Synecdoche New York; Sturridge’s Tom certainly has the obsessive (almost compulsive) streak that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Caden Cotard displayed in Charlie Kaufman’s 2009 drama. Remainder also shares some characteristics with mind and time bending mysteries, though to elaborate further my be to spoil a key plot point.

Sturridge is a pretty solid leading man, though as his character becomes ever increasingly detached from reality it becomes increasingly difficult to empathise with him. This means that, despite a solid mystery and a bunch of well acted parts, Remainder fails to quite hit the heady heights that threatens to do early on.

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The Verdict | While Omer Fast shows promise in his full length debut, Remainder is ultimately closer to an interesting head-scratcher than a mind-bending classic.

3/5

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