Mindscape

Why are all the English actors doing American accents? It's really throwing me off. I feel like they needed to dub Anna's mother's voice in after editing. It's all very bizarre.

Based on the reviews of this movie that I read on this site, I went into this film with high hopes. 90 minutes later,I was truly perplexed as to what all the buzz was about. Maybe films today are so bad that even "average" rates as "very good"? Well, I don't know, and while the film was not a total waste of time, it had little to offer,and was not as half as interesting as the reviews had lead me to believe it would be. The good: The beginning of the movie is very well set up: the movie takes place in the not too distant future where there are people who have the ability to recover and view the memories of others. The protagonist of the movie is a broken down memory reader in need of money and so he goes back to his old employer in search of a job.He is given a "simple" assignment: get a very precocious teenager to eat. But said teenager is *very* smart and not what she appears to be... Both the male lead (the returning memory recovery expert) and female lead ("Anna",the teenager) are played very well. The bad: Very convoluted plot, which devised to make the movie intriguing,in the end was a little over the top and maybe too clever for its own good. The ugly: The ending. Much ado about nothing. I was surprised that after all the complex twists and turns in the move it all came down to (what was in my opinion) an ending that is simple but unfortunately didn't really make much sense.

This movie has one of the best openings ever, thrilling,containing a lot of suspense and well directed, which could also be said about the movie as a whole. The lead actors were quite excellent as well. The movie effortlessly keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout...going into one dimension into another,demanding your focus and attention. So it isn't wishful thinking to expect a great ending leaving an impact on you, but I guess it was. The series of plots and twists in the movie can become a bit too much towards the middle,but it gets on its track later...only to fall over a cliff and crash into the ground at the end. Yep,that's how bad it gets!! Psychological thrillers require a bit of in-depth thinking and attention to enjoy and so does 'Anna'...a great ending could have made this movie a masterpiece but it wasn't meant to be. I would still recommend it if you are into psychological thrillers but do not have high expectations.

Anna, or Mindscape as the original title goes, rides heavily on the presence and acting capabilities of its two main leads, Mark Strong as John, a psychologist with mind reading abilities, and Taissa Farmiga as Anna, his young and eerily disturbed patient. The film itself revolves around the idea that certain humans have developed their latent psychic abilities to such a degree that they can read the minds of others and thus help them overcome traumas and illnesses of the mind. Yeah, it's a bit Inception-esque, but it's different enough in style and atmosphere that you won't mind.

Still, the best part about this film is Mark Strong. His quiet dignified performance holds almost all of the scenes together and his interactions with Farmiga are very interesting to witness. Farmiga's performance suffers a touch from her relative inexperience, at least compared to Strong. You can definitely tell that she's acting in the earlier scenes, but she gets better quickly and her character as a whole nails the eery wonder child trope.

Plot-wise the film is nothing special, being relatively easy to predict and offering no real twists, but it's more of a moodpiece in any case. I would have liked for the actual mindscape scenes to be a bit more creative and the story as a whole to be a bit more overreaching in scope, but those lacks only mean that the film is merely good instead of great.

Mindscape is worth a watch if you're looking for a thriller with a more thoughtful tone and lacking in excessive brutality and gore.

I need to stop reading IMDb reviews for this type of movie. I skipped all the ones who had possible spoiler alerts, but everyone else saying you had figured it out before he did, and the last 20 minutes are useless and so forth did jade me. And reading the reviews did a funny thing, I thought I knew exactly what was going on and I was wrong. So I guess reading the reviews gave me the wrong ideas. Which was actually quite funny because I kept waiting for my version to come down and it never did. So I missed the obvious because I was sure that was not the story. Okay the movie was enjoyable. It was well done. It was a fun thriller/mystery. I thought the acting was good. I liked the concept, and I think I may of really liked it better if I did not read the reviews first. It is not sci fi at all, just the idea of going into someones memories is a cool concept, but the movie was a straight up mystery/thriller. Just watch it and enjoy it with a bag of popcorn and have fun!