Wolfgang Petersen directed this intricate suspense thriller, based on the novel by Richard Neely and starring Tom Berenger as Tom Merrick, who begins to suspect the auto accident that caused his memory loss may not have been accidental. The film begins with a car crash over a seaside cliff in San Francisco. Judith Merrick (Greta Scacchi) is thrown clear of the crash and escapes without injury. Her husband, Tom, on the other hand, is trapped inside and when he is finally rescued, he is disfigured and in a coma. Judith helps him through his ensuing recovery and plastic surgery and the couple returns to their home in San Francisco. Tom, now suffering from selective amnesia, meets his old friends Jeb (Corbin Bernsen) and Jenny Scott (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer). After meeting them, he gathers hints that before the accident, he wasn't well liked by many people. The next day, when he returns to work, he begins to pick up more clues on his past life -- clues that indicate his marriage wasn't as idyllic as he presumed. To make matter worse, he keeps having flashbacks of shattered glass, ocean waves, and a gun. To help him solve the mystery of his past, Dan hires retired private eye Gus Klein (Bob Hoskins), who works with Dan to unravel his past.

Excerpt from MRQE located HERE

Based on Richard Neely's novel The Plastic Nightmare, Petersen's first American feature is a credible and gripping thriller, using ambiguous clues and a complex flashback structure to draw us into the dark heart of an amnesiac maze. Berenger plays a wealthy architect whose life is shattered when he and his wife (Scacchi) plunge over a cliff in their car. Emerging from a coma, he has his face reconstructed, but his memory of the crash has been erased. When he tries to reassemble his life with the help of his wife, who was thrown clear, some pieces of the jigsaw just won't fit. Photos of Scacchi with another man lead him to private eye Hoskins, whom he had hired before the accident to spy on her infidelities with a mystery lover. Meanwhile, his partner's wife (Whalley-Kilmer) is insisting that she and Berenger had been having a torrid affair. Knowing only what Berenger knows, we share his sense of disorientation and vulnerability, while Petersen's sure-footed script and controlled direction eschew self-conscious homage for good old-fashioned adult entertainment.

Gary Tooze

October 5th, 2015