Pain and trauma permeate Michel Franco’s new drama “ Memory, ” about two lost souls who find surprising comfort in one another. Both Jessica Chastain’s Sylvia and Peter Sarsgaard’s Saul are hostage to their own minds, though in vastly different ways. Hers haunts her. His is failing rapidly. And neither are entirely trustworthy.
“Memory,” expanding nationwide Friday, starts as a seemingly standard issue “damaged person” movie, introducing Chastain’s Sylvia celebrating 12 years of sobriety at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that her 12-year-old attends with her. But there are layers to this dramatic mystery, compounded with unreliable narrators and moral grey areas. Before you know it, the film morphs from something familiar into something altogether unexpected.
