The film, she continues, “posits a world in which this technology can help access lost memories and put you back in that moment so you experience them completely fully. The sights, the sounds, the smells. You are back in that moment. Hugh Jackman’s character and Thandiwe Newton’s character have this business, a somewhat struggling business, where they help people retrieve memories for a cost.”
For Jackman, Reminiscence continues the varied range of roles he’s been tackling since he last appeared as Wolverine in 2017’s Logan. “My character is a fairly, I would say, broken man at the beginning,” he remarks during the same online gathering. “Fairly tough exterior but his experiences in the war, on the frontlines, and also as an interrogator has left him really quite broken and really disengaged and distrusting of the world.”
Jackman says that the entrance of Mae into Bannister’s life “changes everything, because he’s not expecting anyone to rock him in any way, particularly in a way that Mae does. He’s just immediately intrigued, drawn in, mesmerized and increasingly becomes, after this relatively short love affair, obsessed with her and needs to really discover what has happened, because he knows in his heart that something bad has happened to her.”
One of the most striking elements of Reminiscence that is glimpsed in the trailer is the setting, a climate change-battered Miami that is gradually succumbing to the rising waters around it. Den of Geek asks Joy how far in the future the movie is set and how important an element climate change is in the film.
“I don’t actually say explicitly what year in the future it is,” she responds. “That was really intentional for me because the future is catching up to us so quickly … I don’t want it to feel like sci-fi set indefinitely far away. I wanted this film at its core to be really relatable and really present and really, in a way, analog. I asked even for the colors in the set design to be warm-hued instead of those cold lights. The future isn’t this distant thing. It’s here, and the things that we do right now form our world so quickly.”
Joy adds that the concept of the waters rising around the southern part of Florida was pretty much ripped from today’s headlines. “If you look at newspapers you see it’s happening,” she explains. “It’s just a scientific fact. I have in the film, as a source of conflict, the disparity of wealth in America. People who don’t have resources are pushed to the borders and left to sink or swim, and the wealthy are able to insulate themselves behind these walls of privilege both physically and emotionally.”