Rebecca Ferguson plays Mae in Reminiscence, a sci-fi thriller from writer-director Lisa Joy that drops its characters into a flooded world strained by climate change and on the brink of conflict. The film pairs Ferguson with Hugh Jackman, who plays Nick Bannister, an alcoholic war veteran whose work lets people step back into memories as if they are reliving another place in their minds.
Mae suddenly disappears, and Nick’s search for her pushes him into a crime mystery built around the memory technology at the center of the story. As he follows what he believes are clues to her whereabouts, the film turns its dystopic setting into more than backdrop: the broken, waterlogged world mirrors the fragility of what Nick thinks he knows about Mae.
That is what gives Reminiscence its weight. Joy, known for Westworld, wrote and directed the film as a tech-noir story, and the comparison is hard to miss. Like her work on television, the movie treats memory as both a tool and a trap, using it to ask how much of the past can ever be trusted once grief and obsession take over.
The setting matters because the world of Reminiscence is not just damaged; it is described as flooded and under constant threat of conflict. That gives Nick’s search a sharper edge. In a place where people are already living with collapse, every memory carries extra weight, and every disappearance feels larger than one man’s private loss.
There is also a tension built into the film’s premise. Nick is trying to find Mae through technology that transports people to another moment in their own mind, but the very thing that helps him look back can also pull him further away from the truth. He is not only chasing a missing woman; he is chasing a version of events shaped by memory, desire and the limits of what the mind can hold onto.
That is why Reminiscence works as a story about more than one disappearance. It is a noir mystery set in a damaged future, and Mae’s vanishing is the spark that exposes how unstable that future already is. The film’s real question is not whether Nick can enter the past, but whether the past can ever give him back anything reliable.
