“a realitybending psychothriller about a young man whose mind gets stuck on repeat”
Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter
It’s all in the mind. As in Memento and Mulholland Drive before it, the function and operation of
memory beguiles Remainder, an absorbing first feature from prolific Israeli video artist Omer
Fast. This noirish, sporadically playful Londonset psychological thriller begins as an unidentified
object falls from the sky, squashing Tom Sturridge’s nameless protagonist like a bug and
providing the starting point for a brisk but esoteric disquisition on identity and trauma.
“What price silence?” is the question that initially propels Remainder, as Sturridge’s character
awakens from a coma to find his lawyer negotiating an unprecedented reparations settlement of
£8.5 million on his behalf. He decides to spend his new fortune recreating a halfremembered
block of apartments, where his demands escalate to Kubrickian levels of perfectionism.
Supporting him in his grand folly is Naz, played in quietly superb fashion by Arsher Ali (“Four
Lions”) as a sort of 21stcentury Jeeves. No scheme is too mad, no request too questionable,
no demand too outlandish.
Catherine Bray
Variety
