Micheal Franco’s latest film “Memory” is about an accidental romance between two troubled persons. While both of them have each own issue to struggle with, they cannot help but attracted to each other after their rather unpleasant encounter, and the movie gently and thoughtfully depicts their emotional struggles with enough understanding and empathy.

At first, the movie dryly establishes the daily life of Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), a single mother who has earned her living via working at a adult care center. As shown from the opening scene, she has been a recovering alcoholic during last 13 years, and we can only imagine how much she struggled before joining her support group for alcoholics 13 years ago. 

During one evening, Sylvia attends her high school reunion party along with her younger sister Olivia (Merritt Wever), and that is when she happens to draw the attention of one of the guys attending the party. When he approaches to her, she rejects his approach, and she becomes more disturbed when he is following after her for some unknown reason after she eventually leaves the party. In the end, he waits outside her residence, and this certainly makes Sylvia all the more disturbed.

In the next morning, this guy is still waiting outside Sylvia’s residence. After confirming that he does not mean any harm, she finds who she should call for him, and she soon comes to learn what his problem is. Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) has been suffering from the early onset of dementia, and he has been living along with his younger brother because of that.

Sylvia is later invited to Saul’s apartment, and then she and Saul have a little private time between them. While Saul does not remember anything about why he followed after her on that day, Sylvia tells something disturbing about her very problematic past. When she was about to enter her adolescence period, she was sexually abused by a certain older high school student and one of his friends, and she thinks Saul is the one who sexually abused her along with that horrible student at that time.

Mainly because Saul does not recognize her at all, Sylvia becomes quite angry as thinking more about that traumatic past of hers. As revealed to us later in the story, nobody believed her story of sexual abuse at that time, and that was the main reason why there has been considerable distance between her and her family members. While she and her younger sister remain cordial to each other, there is always some awkwardness between them, and she still does not want to see her mother again because her mother has refused to believe whatever she tried to tell her mother.

However, it subsequently turns out that Saul was actually not responsible at all for that sexual abuse upon her during that time, so Sylvia naturally apologizes to him, and she soon finds herself attracted to him just like he has been drawn to her – especially after she is requested to take care of him during his younger brother’s absence. While his ongoing illness is surely getting worse day by day, Sylvia steadily stands by him as his caregiver, and, what do you know, they look more like a couple as days go by.

Around that narrative point, Franco’s screenplay delves further into the issues of its two main characters, and we see more of how things are going to remain problematic for each of them. Saul eventually comes to stay at Sylvia’s apartment at least for a while, but, not so surprisingly, he comes to need constant care more than before as he becomes quite confused more often than before. In case of Sylvia, she comes to confront her old family problem again, and there is a hurtful moment when she eventually lets out her childhood trauma in front of her family members including her mother, who still adamantly does not listen at all to whatever her daughter says to her.

Like any good character drama, the movie relies a lot on its two lead performers, and their good performances steadily carry the film to the end. Jessica Chastain, who has kept going with her stellar acting career even after eventually winning an Oscar for “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” (2021), is often harrowing as gradually conveying to us her character’s emotional issues along the story, and she is complemented well by Peter Sarsgaard, who received the Best Actor award when the movie was premiered at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival. In case of several other cast members in the movie, they are sometimes limited by their underwritten characters, but Merritt Wever, Jessica Harper, Josh Charles, Brooke Timber, and Elsie Fisher ably fill their respective supporting parts, and it is certainly nice to see Fisher, who was quite memorable in Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade” (2018), being ready to move onto the next step of her burgeoning acting career, though she is rather under-utilized in her brief appearance here in this film.   

On the whole, “Memory” is somber but sensitive in terms of mood and storytelling, and the result is more satisfying than Franco’s previous films “New Order” (2020) and “Sundown” (2021). As a matter of fact, he already made his next film with Chastain, and I will surely pay some attention to its upcoming premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival early in this year.