Chariot

A man retains a memory of an old life and cannot let it go. A doctor tries to figure out why the memory is persistent. The man continues his existence, unaware of his changed condition and trying to understand his new surroundings.

The story is told with dream logic. It paints mundane concepts on top of an unknowable in-between existence, and drops hints about the characters without telling too much. Is the man's bare room a reflection of who he was before? Is the woman's nicely decorated apartment a reflection of her previous existence?

The doctor's resolution to the man's problem is to burn the memories. He severs the man's ties to his old life, but the cycle continues anew in a different form.

This is one of the better movies I have seen this year and I look forward to more from the writer and director. The cast is also top-notch. The marketing team dropped the ball.

Apart from just a couple of interesting scenes or moments, the entire film is a very pale attempt at surrealist cinema.

Surrealist or avant-garde films are a cool genre. But the problem with many of them is that they just think up weird nonsensical things to put in for the sake of being weird and cool. But the best surrealist films or directors always have a core sensibility to them, a story, a moral, a deep meaning, a connectedness, and either a beauty or terror to it -- eg, "8 1/2" or "Mulholland Drive".

This film tho is just a try-hard sophomoric effort. And the audience sees right thru it, as all the reviewers here have demonstrated. They're not fooled by it's absence of purpose and meaning.

The plot boils down to a word: reincarnation. The script is just ballast to hold that word down.

There was more thought put into this review than into this childish waste of time of a movie, which not even the fairly capable cast could save.

Honestly, one of the worst films I've ever witnessed. Any positive review of this film was obviously written by the director himself, or his mother

Felt like it was written by a 16yr old after his first psychology class.

How this hack of a writer/director ever got any actor to sign onto this project, let alone get financed is beyond comprehension! What has Malcovich done to deserve this! Has he been cancelled and this is the only job he can get? Rosa Salazar is the only performance that feels like she's an actual actor in this piece of garbage. This is a new cinematic low for the industry.

I should have listened to the reviews. The movie started out rather interesting. Disconnected events and a floating man in the apartment building lobby made me wait for a connection. The explanation of the floating man never came and the final story line was really rather simplistic and boring.