Dead Again

A woman who cannot speak and has lost her memory is brought to an orphanage in Los Angeles, waking at night from nightmares. The private detective Mike Church is asked to find out who she is. Answering a newspaper advertisement, the hypnotist Franklyn Madson offers to regress her, and the sessions produce a story from 1948: the conductor Roman Strauss was executed for murdering his wife Margaret. The two timelines start to connect. Kenneth Branagh directed and plays two parts, Mike Church and Roman Strauss. Emma Thompson plays both the woman and Margaret. Derek Jacobi and Andy García are in the cast. The formal choice is clean: the 1948 sections are in black and white and the present is in colour. Robin Williams appears without credit as a disgraced psychiatrist. Being left off the credits was his own request; he did not want audiences taking the film for a comedy. It opened at number one in the United States, stayed there three weeks and took 38 million dollars in the United States and Canada against a 15 million budget. Who it is for: viewers who like heightened melodrama that nods to classic Hollywood thrillers. Who it is not for: anyone wanting realism. The reincarnation structure is deliberately excessive and the final turn comes too easily.