‘Another End’: Berlin Review

Dir: Piero Messina. Italy. 2024. 129mins

Sicilian director Piero Messina is nothing if not confident. He engaged Juliette Binoche for his well-received 2015 debut feature, The Wait, which played both Venice and Toronto. Now he’s back, in Berlin Competition, with a (mostly) English-language sentimental sci-fi starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Renate Reinsve, Berenice Bejo and Olivia Williams. And it is that cast, playing (mostly) to the top of their respective games, that lifts this memory implant story set in the kind of ‘future present’ that has become the default setting for indie sci-fi.

The cast lifts this memory implant story

Another End has a lot going for it, not least its command of audiovisual atmosphere and the way it makes the audience work to join the narrative dots before delivering a sucker punch final twist that will encourage lively post-screening debate. The risk in such cases is always that ‘clever’ supplants ‘moving’, but clever done well is already a good start, and it seems likely that Another End will bring the Sicilian director to a much wider public than his previous chamber drama. An assistant director to Paolo Sorrentino on The Great Beauty, Messina is still painting on a small canvas but both master and disciple share a pair of traits: they are strong on sound and vision while often a little weak in the script department.

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind taught us that you do not need futuristic sets to make good emotional sci-fi. Spike Jonze’s Her reminded us that future cities are right here, if you know where to look. Another End draws from both these wells, rooting its story in love and loss while inventively assembling its vision of a near future world from readily available pieces of right here, right now.

Just as the Los Angeles of Her was, at least in part, Shanghai’s Pudong district, the exteriors of the unnamed metropolis in Another End were shot on location in Neuilly, Mitterand’s high-rise add-on to Paris. But away from the skyscrapers and suspended walkways of this brave new centre-less city, people seem to live in the same old houses, squats and apartments, and travel to work on the same old graffiti-covered metro carriages. It is a place where today’s retreat into ever smaller social bubbles has accelerated: instead of screens, people watch their memories, eyes turned inwards, covered by a misty veil.

Garcia Bernal’s Sal is even more taciturn, closed off and depressed than most, for reasons we don’t immediately understand. His sister Ebe (Bejo) is on a ‘cheer Sal up’ mission, but she is finding it hard going. (They speak Spanish to each other, but otherwise English is this nowhere city’s common language). Sal visits an elderly neighbour in an apartment that positively reeks of the fusty past, who continues chatting unperturbed as her husband is taken away in a plastic tent by men in white sanitary gear.

Soon enough for it to not be much of a spoiler, the big reveal comes: a company called Aeterna is able to harvest the memories of dead loved ones and implant them in hosts – regular people who are making a bit of money on the side by becoming someone else for a few hours. Monitored by a psychiatrist, the encounters are supposed to be risk-free (good luck with that) and strictly limited in number. They are designed for those, like Sal, who have lost people suddenly and traumatically, with no chance to say a proper goodbye. Reinsve plays Zoe, Sal’s dead wife; or rather, she plays the Zoe surrogate that Ebe – who works for Aeterna – has persuaded the reluctant Sal to let back into his life, so he can achieve some kind of closure.

It’s a promising premise – if all that information can be fed to us in small doses, and if it doesn’t stretch credibility too much. Another End is better at the former task. The sketchy science behind the fiction is papered over with cool set pieces, like the huge hangar where the surrogates wake up after their day’s work of being someone else, unzipping themselves from their plastic coffins like some Amazon warehouse version of the Resurrection. Other stylistic choices feel a little derivative – surely Blade Runner put a moratorium on origami in sci-fi? – and some of the banal backstory details seem supplied by a generative AI script engine.

Messina has his mentor Sorrentino’s instinct for mood music (some of it of his own composing), but it’s largely the performances, especially that of Reinsve – plus Olivia Williams in a tiny role – that keep things real. In The Worst Person In The World, the Norwegian actress was handed a hugely nuanced role. To make us believe in a character who teeters on the edge of cliché is somehow even more impressive.