On the IMDb listing for Before I Go to Sleep, the only trivia item for the film reads as follows: “This was the last feature film to use Fuji 35mm film stock. Production of this film stock ceased at this time.” There’s no source for this oddly worded factoid, and I couldn’t google up any verification for it. In fact, the only other reference to this piece of trivia is a lone YouTube comment on the trailer for Before I Go to Sleep. The comment was written by a user named “hollywoodstreams,” and it has the exact same wording as the IMDb trivia piece. The closest I could come to “proving” this statement’s veracity is discovering that you can’t buy 35 mm film on the Fujifilm USA website. So either this is a convincing piece of made-up trivia, or it’s a true fact that’s so inconsequential nobody but one person on the internet gives a shit about it.

Either way, it’s a fitting legacy for Before I Go to Sleep, a movie so generic and uninspired that even its production trivia is generic and uninspired. I like to think that the Fujifilm comment is true, because a movie this boring really ought to be one of the final wheezes of filmmaking on film. It’s as though hundreds of thriller directors passed the torch forward through a century of cinema, only to have that torch be extinguished in a shallow puddle of piss.

You may have noticed that I haven’t said anything about the actual content of the film by the third paragraph of this review. That’s because the movie is so uninteresting that my brain keeps wanting to find something, anything, else to think about. But duty calls, so here you go: Nicole Kidman plays Christine, a woman with a very particular type of amnesia that wipes her brain whenever she sleeps. Every time she wakes up, she forgets that she’s a 40-year-old woman married to a man named Ben (Colin Firth), and Ben has to remind her all over again that they love each other, with the help of a collage of photographs of their wedding and life together. (And yes, if some distant alarm bell in your brain is ringing, it’s true: This is the exact situation Drew Barrymore found herself in at the end of the sorta-enjoyable Adam Sandler film 50 First Dates. But I digress. Again.) Christine is receiving calls from a Dr. Nasch (Mark Strong), who claims to be a mental health professional who wants to help her. Nasch also doesn’t want Christine to tell her husband she’s seeing him, which is supposed to be intriguing but only comes across as an annoying plot contrivance.

Before I Go to Sleep is your standard woman-in-peril thriller, the sort of thing that maybe would’ve been good cheesy fun if it wound up as a no-budget D movie on Lifetime. But as a major motion picture with talented actors, it’s just disastrously dull, and the requisite twists are about as lifeless as possible. (The film was adapted by director Rowan Joffe from a best-selling novel that I haven’t read.) At least Firth is as interesting to watch as always, I suppose, and Kidman isn’t as bad as she’s been in her most recent roles. But really, the only reason to watch this thing is for its status as a footnote to a footnote in cinematic history, and even that asterisk might be denoting a lie.