After over a decade of more misses than hits, Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan returns to the character-driven intrigues of his early career. Instead of the young protagonists of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, he builds the Benjamin August–penned Remember around two Oscar-winning octogenarians. A perfectly cast Christopher Plummer plays Zev Guttman, a Holocaust survivor with memory loss who transforms into a hit man after the death of his wife. Encouraged by fellow survivor Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau), a retirement home neighbor, Zev sets out to execute Otto, the Auschwitz guard who killed their families.
The wheelchair-bound Max takes care of the details, while Zev purchases a Glock and travels from New York to Nevada (by way of Ontario) to track down his prey, but it proves more difficult than expected since Otto has been living under an assumed name. During the journey, Zev's son, Charles (Henry Czerny), tries to bring him back home, while Zev has bizarre and frightening encounters with an unapologetic Bruno Ganz and an unhinged Dean Norris until he locates his quarry.
If the sort-of-surprising ending doesn't completely satisfy, this unsentimental, flashback-free affair offers resonant counterpoint to Egoyan's Ararat, in which he grappled with the genocide of his own people, the Armenians, by the Ottoman Empire.
