ANNA (2013)

Studio:       Vertical Entertainment
Director:    Jorge Dorado
Writer:       Guy Holmes
Producer:  Jaume Collet-Serra, Peter Safran, Juan Sola, Mercedes Gamero
Stars:     Mark Strong, Taissa Farmiga, Saskia Reeves, Richard Dillane, Indira Varma, Noah Taylor, Alberto Ammann, Brian Cox

Review Score:

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Summary:

A memory detective is assigned to enter the mind of a 16-year-old girl in order to find a link to her sociopathic behavior.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

John Washington works as a memory detective for Mindscape, the prime memory detective agency in the world. While investigating the memory of a client, the image of an overflowing bathtub triggers John’s own memory of finding his wife after she committed suicide in their bathroom. John suffers a seizure when the two memories merge with each other.

During John’s subsequent recovery, fellow agent Peter Lundgren becomes the top memory detective at Mindscape. Peter is assigned a high profile case regarding the disgraced Senator Rockford. To get John back on his feet, Mindscape boss Sebastian assigns John the case of 16-year-old Anna Greene. Anna was a troubled psychiatric patient of Sebastian’s when she was younger. Since being removed from school as well as cutting herself, Anna has been confined at home and engaged in a hunger strike to protest against her parents’ treatment of her.

John meets Anna’s wealthy socialite mother Michelle and her stern stepfather Robert. John meets Anna and tests her for sociopathic tendencies. After the introductory consultation with Anna concludes, John meets Judith, one of the nurses who monitors the girl around the clock via the Greene estate’s surveillance system.

During their first memory session together, Anna regresses far back enough that John sees early childhood memories of her stepfather Robert having sex with the family maid Jamie. He also witnesses an incident in which Michelle accidentally cuts Anna’s hand with a letter opener after she and her husband argue about Anna.

Following the session, Anna tries pressing John for personal information. John agrees to show Anna a picture of his deceased wife, also named Anna, if the girl will end her hunger strike. Anna agrees and the two begin forming a bond that grows gradually through their additional sessions.

John asks Michelle to show him the letter opener that stabbed Anna as a child. John goes on a date with Judith and tells her what happened to his wife. After their young son died, John’s wife became addicted to spending time in her memories of the child. When John refused to keep bringing her there with his ability, Anna killed herself.

Meanwhile, John begins seeing strange glimpses of a man in shadows stalking him. He also begins randomly seeing glimpses of Anna out of the corner of his eye even though she is confined to the Greene family mansion.

John returns to the Greene residence the next day and discovers that Judith is in the hospital after being pushed over a staircase railing. Anna insists she is innocent and that her father framed her so that she can be institutionalized and he can take her inheritance fund.

Initially stonewalled, John is able to investigate the file Sebastian kept on Anna. John discovers that Anna was suspected of poisoning fellow private school students Susan Merrick, Courtney Coker, and Kristin Ford at the Whitten Academy, but the charges against Anna were dismissed. Anna was also involved in some sort of relationship with her photography teacher Tom Ortega, who went to prison for taking suggestive photos of Anna.

John goes back into Anna’s memories to investigate the poisonings and finds a girl Anna identifies as Megan Scanlon, nicknamed “Mousey,” who Anna claims is actually responsible for the crime. Afterwards, John confronts Anna with his suspicions that she might be intentionally falsifying her memories.

John visits Tom Ortega in prison. Ortega tells John that Anna framed him. John also meets with Susan Merrick, who now has a hole in her throat, and she claims that she never knew anyone nicknamed Mousey, but is convinced that Anna is dangerous.

On his next visit to the Greene residence, John investigates Robert’s office for clues hinting at the stepfather’s involvement in Anna’s abuse. John finds a photograph of Anna with an abacus that he recognizes from Sebastian’s office. John returns to Anna’s memories again, but his own memories interfere when pan water in a photography class flashback triggers another recollection of his wife’s death. When John awakens from the memory, he discovers that Anna exited before he did and downloaded a screensaver to his computer while he was under.

John finds a memory in Anna’s mind of being molested by Sebastian. Anna gives John a key as a keepsake memento of their bond. John confronts Sebastian with an abuse allegation, but Sebastian claims John is being manipulated.

His work with Anna concluded, John eventually realizes that the handwriting on Anna’s drawings is the same as that on a photo Anna claimed came from Mousey. John checks the Whitten Academy yearbook and discovers that a different girl was nicknamed Mousey and that the girl Anna claimed was Megan Scanlon was actually someone else.

Anna calls John in a panicked phone call that is cut off. John rushes to the Greene residence, which he finds in disarray, and becomes locked in the surveillance room. When the door later opens, John follows a blood trail into the forest until he finds Anna. Anna takes John’s hands and says, “I’m sorry.” Anna runs away before the police arrive. John realizes he has blood on his hands as he is arrested.

John discovers that he has been framed for killing Anna, even though her body has not been found. Child pornography, planted when Anna changed John’s desktop, is discovered on John’s computer. The key gifted by Anna and worn around his neck is found to unlock the surveillance room door. The assumption is that John drugged her parents before killing Anna with the letter opener, having become obsessed with the girl through their sessions together.

John realizes that Anna used him to escape and made it look as though she was murdered so that her parents would not look for her. It is then revealed that John had been retelling the entire story of Anna to Peter Lundgren in a memory detective session meant to prove John’s innocence.

John makes amends with Sebastian in the aftermath. John also sells the beach house that reminds him of his wife in order to post bail. Anna takes a Polaroid of herself and sends it along with a rose to John with a note that says, “thank you.” John then returns to visit Judith and rekindle their romance.

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Review:

By employing a type of remote viewing psychic, the Mindscape Corporation has supplanted polygraph testing in the not too distant future with an agency of memory detectives who can enter a person’s mind and verify facts.  Provided that person is not mentally falsifying evidence, of course.  John Washington is one of Mindscape’s top investigators.  Until his own memories bleed into those of a client’s after inadvertently recalling the image of his wife dead in a bathtub from suicide.

Things change while John recovers from his resultant seizure.  To put John back on his feet, his boss Sebastian assigns him what should be the slam-dunk case of Anna, a 16-year-old girl on a self-imposed hunger strike.  All John has to do is find the trauma triggering her behavior and cash the check from Anna’s rich parents.  But what John finds in her mind is a slowly unraveling secret that hides the truth behind Anna’s past and the explanation for her sociopathic tendencies.

Despite that premise, “Anna” is not a futuristic sci-fi thriller focused on the science behind its concept.  Nor does it paint a dystopian future Philip K. Dick fantasy of a Big Brother society impacted by psychic ability.  Memory detectives are portrayed as merely a quiet aside, intended only to frame how the mystery is solved without the fiction becoming a distraction.  “Anna” is otherwise grounded in a world where its landscape and tension feels both real and relatable.

With a deliberately measured pace and intentionally dreary mood, as the scenery is nearly always covered by dark hues and grey skies, the film instead takes its energy from the portraits painted of its central characters.  “Anna” is a suspense thriller dependent upon the psychological drama depicted in the back and forth interplay between fractured investigator John and complicated teenager Anna.

Anna wants John to recognize her intelligence and to respect her for it without having to showboat her cunning.  Taissa Farmiga injects a precise amount of smarmy sass that carefully sidesteps reading as overconfident arrogance.  In the process, she makes Anna into John’s equal for their war of willpowers and takes Anna well past a predictable characterization of manipulative maturity beyond her years.

Always shown stubble-faced with two deep crevices between his eyebrows, Mark Strong is like a more intense version of Stanley Tucci as memory detective John.  Only once does Strong betray his hidden British accent by referring to the girl as “Anner.”

John’s layered relationship with Anna and how it unfolds is the cornerstone of what makes “Anna” an intriguing watch.  The best scenes always involve John and Anna together, wordlessly measuring one another for strengths and weaknesses.  Although an unfortunate side effect of John’s role as passive observer in replayed memories is that a touch too much of Mark Strong’s screen time is devoted to him simply staring pensively.

The structure of the story itself is a little less balanced than the dynamic of the leads.  A number of Chekhov’s guns are laid out naked in full view of the audience without much attempt at cleverness.  An early scene makes an overly deliberate to-do about an accidentally bumped abacus, ending on a close-up of fallen pieces being returned to a table.  A moment like this is such a sore thumb that when a photo is later shown depicting Anna with that same abacus, the viewer ends up in on the clue ahead of John.

While some segments feel the drag of a slowed tempo, other moments condense time in ways that unintentionally cloud details.  With Anna and John’s backstories delivered piecemeal, holes are sometimes filled with dialogue such as, “It’s been two years.  You should move on from what happened with your wife.”  This is the kind of line that is spoken for the audience’s benefit rather than the character’s.

Like many twisty thrillers made to play with perception through misdirection, “Anna” leads to a final reveal that leaves behind some nagging questions when it is all said and done.  The story basically builds into an elaborate plan to execute what turns out to be a somewhat simple endgame, and looking too deeply at the details can spoil satisfaction in the climax.

But “Anna” is more about the journey than the destination.  Even if some pieces of the mystery are bobbled a bit, the rest of the production exudes enough confidence to sustain interest in the outcome and in the experience.

Even with his odd fascination for shooting down spiral staircases, cinematographer Oscar Faura captures a haunting tone filled with moody bleakness.  And despite some staging hiccups story-wise, director Jorge Dorado excels where it matters most.  And that is in tuning his lead actors into delivering performances that push “Anna” above its shortcomings to keep it engaging as a controlled thriller rich in personality and high on atmosphere.

NOTE: “Anna” was previously titled “Mindscape.”

Review Score:  70

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