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REMAINDER
[2015, UK, GERMANY – English]

OMER FAST, the Israeli-born, US-raised, Berlin-based video artist makes his feature debut as a director with REMAINDER - a striking adaptation of English novelist TOM McCARTHY's 2005 cult novel of the same name. The mind-bending thriller centers around an unnamed thirty-year-old protagonist (TOM STURRIDGE) who suffers the trauma of a freak accident that leaves him at death's door, and his unorthodox methods to rebuild his life. The opening scene is beautifully intriguing, where we see Tom hurriedly tries to stop a cab and fails, then crosses the street, leaving a black suitcase behind, and within that first two minutes of the film some unidentified object falls from above and crushes him to the ground, sending him into a coma. Tom then awakens with his memory wiped off but richer by £8.5 million, as a compensation which in return pays for his silence as well, he is to say nothing about the incident. With only a few shards of memory he’s retained, Tom obsessively reconstructs them into physical form, with the hope to unlock the rest of the clues about his past. Suddenly enjoying a whole lot of funds at his disposal, he engages a facilitator, Naz (ARSHER ALI) to orchestrate his elaborate “stage”, from purchasing an entire apartment block and recruiting a group of cast to play his neighbors, to staging an actual bank heist.

As Tom delves deeper into his contrived and obsessed pursuit, we see him transform from just fragile to somewhat abusive and unlikeable. One of the main strengths of the story is watching his character becomes more consumed by his obsession, and in his relentless recreating of his past, somehow he reaches a point of recreating his future. And while we see how the film reaches an ending that strangely transports audience back to the opening scene, much may still be left unclear and unanswered. That's intentional. Without too much involvement by McCarthy during the entire filming process, Fast digests the book in a way he best knows how, and even whips up a different ending altogether. He sees the film as a portrait of the broken protagonist who's pushed back into the world again when he's clearly not ready, placing the audience in the same disorienting fugue state as him. "He is kind of disgorged by the system," Fast shared during an interview, adding "given this lump sum of money and he has no clue what to do; the few crumbs left from his former life are the things he holds onto, which he tries to build between to make a portrait of himself. As a result, the film becomes extremely subjective. He can’t see things clearly or have an ordered understanding of what he is doing or who he is so we have these kind of impressionistic versions of reality. That is what the film is trying to do." REMAINDER proffers a Memento-like mystery with a twist, supported with a solid performance by Sturridge. The film also stars CUSH JUMBO and ED SPEELERS.

Rating: B

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