Before I Go to Sleep (Rowan Joffé, 2014)

Nicole Kidman stars as a woman with anterograde amnesia, waking up every day with all events of the past ten years wiped from her memory, her unrecognised husband stoically repeating the essentials to her before heading off to work. When a neurologist starts to treat her in the husband's absence, she gradually begins to make some progress in reassembling her past, which does not turn out rosy at all.
Although there have been numerous films that have featured the condition, they will now always inevitably be compared to Memento, where a slow reveal technique and a razor-sharp plot structure brought home the awful reality of the disorder with full force while enhancing the thriller element. With Before I Go to Sleep, on the other hand, you feel from the outset that a happy ending is in the process of being smuggled in and, as the ailment is proven to be a reversible one, the plot becomes increasingly degenerative, its logic falling apart a good while before the tired stalker phase and the flaccid denouement.

4/10