The best-selling 2011 novel that this film adapts was a bravura piece of writing that superbly sustained its high concept for 300 pages before an abrupt denouement that left the reader feeling cheated.
The same problem mars the handsome screen version, which is superbly acted and, for much of its intricately plotted length, grips like a vice. But in the final reel we find ourself pitched into a hoary old "he's in the house" horror unworthy of the complicated web in which we've been entangled.
The main character, Christine Lucas (Kidman), through whose eyes the novel was narrated, is a woman who forgets: each night as she sleeps, a quarter-century of memory is erased, and, with the assistance of her husband, a mild-mannered chemistry teacher called Ben (Firth), and a lot of snapshots and Post-It notes, she must learn to be herself anew each morning. The story's meticulous construction reveals her back story in snatches and crucially Ben is not her only source of information.
A neuropsychologist (Strong) assures her she's his patient (though oddly he tells her to keep that fact from Ben), being treated for what he calls atypical psychogenic amnesia; her mind is protecting itself by making her forget the trauma that caused its disease.
Gradually, though, things start to add up wrong -- no more should be said than that and the producers, to their credit, have crafted a superb trailer that gives nothing away and leads us up false trails where the film itself doesn't take us.
