Remainder

Remainder, based on Tom McCarthy’s novel, is a psycho-thriller, the first fictional feature film by Israeli video artist Omer Fast. The story begins with a dramatic event: Tom, the protagonist, played by British actor Tom Sturridge, is hit in the head by an unidentified object. The after-effects of this trauma scar not only his body and damage his mental state. After waking from a coma into a different reality, of which he has no memory, Tom clings to a series of dark memories, and is determined to reconstruct every detail of his past. Thanks to money offered by the insurance company in exchange for never revealing what happened, his frantic search for memories becomes an obsession. He builds cardboard models of buildings that resurface in his memory, switches to meticulous full-scale reconstructions, inhabited by actors hired to play characters, and withdraws into a cocoon of alternate reality conscientiously manufactured. The film unfolds in an endless loop in which the central event of the story is repeated over and over again. Omer Fast explores not only reality and non-reality issues, but gives rise to a reflection on the ephemeral nature of the human mind. The memory of origins, desire and trauma are elements that flow into each other, interrupting conventional narrative.