‘Arrested Memory’ Venice Review: Sabu Turns Amnesia Into an Absurd Crime Comedy
An amnesiac detective investigates a kidnapping, but his failing memory turns a carefully planned police operation into increasingly absurd farce. Out of Competition.
Drama and comedy collide throughout Arrested Memory, the latest action-crime film from Japanese genre veteran Sabu. What’s unusual —though hardly unprecedented in Asian cinema— is the way the film shifts between modes. Rather than blending comedy and drama into a seamless whole, it constantly reinvents itself from scene to scene: one moment it’s a psychological drama, the next a broad comedy, then a police thriller, only to start the cycle all over again.
Its protagonist is Lee (Ethan Juan), a celebrated detective in Taipei. But the meticulously planned raid that opens the film goes disastrously wrong when Lee, for reasons that remain unclear at first, suddenly forgets what he’s supposed to do, exposing his entire team in front of the criminals. He regains his bearings just in time to survive, but every member of his squad is slaughtered. Lee has developed a form of episodic amnesia that strikes without warning, leaving him unable to remember where he is or what he’s doing. Rather than revealing his condition, however, he buries the trauma and continues working.
He’s soon assigned to investigate a kidnapping that bears more than a passing resemblance to Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low. The son of a wealthy Japanese businessman visiting Taiwan has been abducted, and Lee is dispatched to oversee the negotiations at the family’s luxurious home. The problem is that he’s in no state to lead anything. He repeatedly forgets why he’s there, somehow allows a drug addict to join the negotiating table, and bungles nearly every step of the process. Miraculously, no one seems to notice.
Carrying both the ransom money and the weight of his trauma, Lee heads into the city to meet the kidnappers. Predictably, somewhere along the way he completely forgets who he is and what mission he’s on. From that point forward, the film leans much more openly into farce, filling the story with mistaken identities, hapless criminals, escalating misunderstandings, and increasingly absurd situations, many of them caused by Lee’s own confusion.
Every so often Sabu returns to Lee’s nightmares and the psychological wounds left by the opening tragedy, and even introduces other damaged people along the way—including a suicidal young woman whom Lee inadvertently helps. But any hint of introspection is quickly abandoned in favor of comedy, turning Lee’s bizarre behavior and perpetual disorientation into the engine for a series of increasingly slapstick set pieces.
Running a brisk 87 minutes, Arrested Memory works best as a lightweight comic exercise about an amnesiac detective stumbling from one impossible situation to the next while trying to solve a kidnapping. Plausibility is beside the point—this is Sabu’s cinema, after all—and Lee survives every predicament more through accident than skill. There is a more compelling drama buried within the premise, one about a traumatized police officer struggling to function after unimaginable loss. But this isn’t that film. Sabu introduces that possibility only to leave it behind, transforming his damaged protagonist into the comic relief of his own story.
