Movie Reviews of Dead Again
- This is going to be all about the Kenneth Branagh/Emma Thompson movie Dead Again, so if you haven't seen it be warned: spoilers ahoy!
If you haven't seen the film, the basic plot is as follows: Mike Church, a private detective, is hired to find out the identity of an amnesiac woman who appeared one night at the orphanage he grew up in. The building used to be a private home, owned by a wealthy man called Roman (also played by Branagh) who was executed in the 1940s for killing his wife Margaret (also played by Thompson). As Mike and the woman, who's being called Grace, grow closer and find out more about Roman and Margaret, strange similarities between their respective relationships become clear...helped in large part by the antique shop owner who's using hypnosis to induce Grace to tell the story of Roman and Margaret's marriage using past-life regression. Eventually Grace comes to fear that Mike's going to kill her the way Roman did Margaret. The twist is that Roman didn't kill his wife; his housekeeper's son, now the antique shop owner, did. Oh, and Margaret didn't become Grace, nor did Roman become Mike; the shop owner was having Grace relate her experiences in the third person, which obscures the correct relationships until Mike is also regressed and relives his own murder. In the end, all's well that ends well.
What delights me about the film is the double twist. We think it's all about whether Mike can overcome Roman's murderous impulses enough to not hurt Grace, and even when it's revealed that Roman wasn't the murderer at all we think that's all there is to the traditional thriller twist ending. But Mike's repeated protestations that "I'm not Roman!" take on a new meaning when we find out he's right--he's Margaret. The really beautiful part is the names. All "Mike" and "Margaret" share is the same initial consonant, but towards the end of the movie we learn that Grace's real name is "Amanda", a name which means "worthy of love". And what's a love story? A romance...
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