Mnemophrenia is a futuristic drama about a new psychosis that arises from advanced virtual reality technology, which causes people to be unable to distinguish between real and artificial memories.
Jeanette Harper (Freya Berry) seems to have found the perfect guy, a handsome fellow named Douglas (Tim Seyfert). He’s got an interesting job and lives on an antique houseboat. He’s reset her standards for what a relationship should be and becomes the first real love of her life. Thing is, he isn’t real; he’s just a man in a virtual reality world, one that is utterly lifelike. Worse, she didn’t know, at least until some time later. That was years ago, and now she’s divorced and in group therapy, trying to deal with a condition called Mneophrenia, where memories made in VR have become part of the living world. Some believe it has benefits, including Nicholas Morgan (Robin King), Jeanette’s grandson, who is trying to advance virtual reality to a new level of immersion, but finding resistance in how some feel Mnemophrenia is too risky.
From writer and director Eirini Konstantinidou, in her feature film debut, Mnemophrenia is a curious leap into Indie science fiction, following in the footsteps of a few others while trying to give old ideas some fresh beats. I can’t say it always works, the film’s purposefully staid pace and lack of momentum keeping it out of reach for most fans of the genre. However, for the thinker in the audience, perhaps craving something a little more cerebral, there’s plenty to ponder.
Konstantinidou divides her story into three distinct parts, each played out years apart, all dealing with the consequences of sharing real and created memories. The third of these parts involves a terminally ill woman named Robyn (Tallulah Sheffield), whose place in all this I’ll not reveal, but like most of the movie is told nearly entirely through dialogue, often through the point of view of the person experiencing the memory. That leaves us looking directly at the partner in conversation, they staring directly into the camera. In one part, this POV is enhanced with strings of information that pop up on screen, like data on a video game heads up display. It’s all very sci-fi-y looking, but the movie doesn’t weight it all down with too much techno-babble, keeping nearly all of it about what it means to be, well, I want to say “afflicted” with the titular condition, though the script works to keep both sides of good and bad always on the table.
Some will surely quibble with the way Mnemophrenia unspools its limited mystery, to the point where there really isn’t any. I quibble. While one might expect a good portion of the film to keep us in the blind as it were as to what is real or not, Konstantinidou instead lets the cat out of the bag early and concentrates on the long term tributaries of a generation that are being born with the film’s conceit and embracing it, the impacts of such having some play on the future. And this leads to the movie’s best bits of discovery, one that inspires the most questions about a possible reality we might actually face.
However, Mnemophrenia is a talky drama with some big ideas that doesn’t quite grip with the intensity it seems primed to deliver. It’s rather small, the world it lives in made up of only a few people, leaving the scale of the film’s position decidedly narrow. These are the limitations of any independent filmmaker though, and to be fair Konstantinidou wisely don’t try to overstep what she and her production are capable of doing, succeeding by good use of its cast and focusing on the plot. Mix in some intriguing visuals and quality writing, along with the film’s overlapping timelines that seem to echo across the past, present, and future, and we get a short story with a finale that reaches for something grand. No, it doesn’t really explore its potential as greatly as it might, ending up feeling more like an episode on a well-made television sci-fi show, but it’s different, and tries to hang its hat on something new. Kudos for the effort.