Starring Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, Memory is an emotional movie about love, family and forgetfulness.

Memory, no matter how inaccurate or unreliable, is the scaffolding that forms the basis of our lives. So what do you do when you’re trapped by memories from the past, and how do you function if you don’t remember anything?

Memory plays with this dilemma through its two lead characters, Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) and Saul (Peter Sarsgaard).

Sylvia is a social worker and single mother who lives a closed life. He doesn’t have a close relationship with anyone other than his daughter Anna (Brooke Timber, wise beyond her years), his younger sister Olivia (Merritt Weaver, in a great performance), and his AA peers. He meticulously locks his apartment door three times, and in one scene, he specifically asks a female repairman to fix his refrigerator.

At Olivia’s insistence, Sylvia accompanies her to her high school reunions. Sylvia, who immediately retreats into herself with the joy brought by alcohol and feels lonely, cuts herself off and runs for unknown reasons when a man named Saul approaches her.

Saul continues to follow him home and parks outside his apartment in the rain until morning, where Sylvia finds him in a dazed daze. Despite her initial fear, Sylvia, whose social worker instincts kick in, manages to track down her brother/caregiver Isaac (a suitably disturbed Josh Charles). It soon turns out that Saul has early-onset dementia.

Memory is about power imbalances and negotiating relationships in which money is a looming specter.

Realizing that he and his brother share a kinship, Isaac raises the possibility of becoming Saul’s day care worker. Thus begins a faltering relationship between Sylvia and Saul, initially mired in misunderstanding and misremembering, which later develops into something much more moving and tender.

Sylvia vacillates between being Saul’s protector and friend. There are times when they exist in equal balance; for example, while doing the dishes together, listening to music, or playing simple games like Guess Who.

Other times, Saul’s condition rears its head and catapults them back into the roles of patient and caregiver; for example, when Sylvia finds him naked and helpless on the bathroom floor, or when he becomes disconsolate while watching a movie he can barely follow. .

The lines between Sylvia and Saul become blurrier as they find comfort in each other, first emotionally and then physically. Sylvia becomes Saul’s lover and thus loses her livelihood as his caretaker.

As Sylvia and Saul’s unorthodox relationship strengthens, Anna rekindles Sylvia’s bond with her estranged grandmother (relentlessly played by Jessica Harper) for reasons she never shared with her daughter.

Writer and director Michel Franco is careful never to pass judgment on Sylvia and Saul’s unlikely union. They exist in arrested emotional states, and so their relationships are never presented to us in truly black-and-white terms.

Saul is infantilized by the circumstances of his illness and denied agency and autonomy by his brother Isaac and niece Sara (Elsie Fisher), who in turn pamper him to the point of suffocation. For reasons related to her childhood trauma, Sylvia is similarly distrusted by those around her; He is not considered a reliable arbiter of his own memories and life experiences, and is also seen as someone in need of constant care.

In this way, Saul and Sylvia find freedom and liberation in their unhindered relationship with each other.

The same power imbalances play out in other parts of Sylvia and Saul’s lives. Saul is strangled by Isaac in a house where they both live, but which he owns and was probably purchased before his health failed. He visits a restaurant where the waiter claims to know his order, even though he can’t remember it.

Sylvia is both an overprotective and emotionally indifferent mother to Anna, who takes on the parental role at different moments in the film. Little sister Olivia is everything Sylvia is not; warm and friendly, stable and reliable, financially secure and in a stable relationship. They also differ in one important respect, which divides their lives as children and makes you look at Olivia in a completely different light when she emerges.

As a survivor of childhood trauma and crippled by disease, Sylvia and Saul see signs of danger in their daily lives. Franco plays on this ignorance and the evil of being abandoned by those who should have our best interests at heart. He extends this to other characters as well, creating a tense and unsettling watch at times.

It’s a strong cast overall, but Chastain and Sarsgaard are particularly excellent. Chastain portrays Sylvia with a mixture of ambivalent insecurity and rebellious steeliness, deftly parsing the long-term effects of trauma on one’s personality and negotiation with the world at large.

Without the support of memories, Saul is an unmoored person. Sarsgaard brings a beautiful sensitivity to his portrayal of Saul, who vacillates between contented indifference and deep anguish as he struggles to reconcile his absence of memories with what’s happening around him.

Ultimately, what Memory says is that remembering does not lead to understanding and forgetting is not synonymous with absence. In this inexplicable love story, Sylvia and Saul see and see each other.