Flashback is a highly polarising movie that audiences either find incredibly intense or incredibly slow. Much of your reaction will depend on how you relate to the story and storytelling. For audiences who’ve never experienced significant loss, or mainly watch CGI and Marvel, this movie will be impossible to decipher.
The key to understanding this movie, is understanding the long forgotten art of metaphor. With just a handful of bread crumbs we experience the protagonist’s mental journey, not simply as outside observers.
The plot
A young man (Fred) is confronted with the tragedy that his mother, his sole parent, has not only lost all her memories but only a few days to live. As the doctor explains the effects of aphasia and her prognosis, Fred becomes lost in shock.
Fred goes to his mother’s hospital bed, but she recoils in fear. His mother is confused, traumatised, and lost in world she cannot recognise. Fred walks out and blankly tells his wife, she’s already dead. This is a traumatic loss and a double blow. First her mind dies, and later her body will follow.
Flashback is essentially the story of Fred’s journey of grief, acceptance, and growth.
What’s real, and what’s not.
Coping with the mental processes of anguish are not an easy subject for screen. Here the writer (Christopher MacBride) has drawn on a number of visual and metaphorical tools.
His highschool crush, Cindy
Rather than facing his pain head-on, Fred’s mind escapes into the past. The cascade begins with memories of a girl in high school who he’d never had the courage to approach. Not only is Cindy the one who got away (just as Fred’s entering a new phase of married life), but because of this this, Cindy becomes the personification of regret for Fred. Fred seeks to follow Cindy through her ‘exploration’, and she leads Fred through all the twists and turns his life could’ve taken if he simply lived in the now. Cindy is Fred’s internal guide to all his ‘might’ve beens’, for better or worse.
His high school friends, Sebastian and Andre
Numb and seeking escape, Fred finds himself in a stripbar. Against all probabilities he runs into Sebastian, an old high school friend that he was just thinking about earlier in the day. Sebastian is blunt, irresponsible, and reckless — the perfect agent of denial. His advice to Fred? Get drunk and forget about Cindy and everything else. But try as he might, Sebastian is unable to shake Fred from his obsession with Cindy.
Fred heads back to Sebastian’s place where he meets the final character in the highschool set. Andre, is anxious and skittish, and fearful of any mention of Cindy. He suddenly asks if Fred has studied for the exams, which throws Fred’s mind back to high school. Andre personifies avoidance.
The drug Mercury
Mercury is likely not a real drug that Fred or his school friends used. While it may represent all the different crazy and risky activities (including drugs) that Fred and his friends did during that phase of his life, it’s also something more than that.
Mercury’s purpose is a metaphor to eliminating the illusions caused by the interpretation of perception and memory: “Numbers. Language. Color. Shape. All a misinterpretation of the information around you. A misinterpretation imposed on you by an invasive life-form that is trying to control your consciousness. The substance you ingested temporarily counteracts the influence of the invasive life-form that is trying to force you to perceive information in the same manner as itself: in a linear fashion. To perceive choices as having inescapable outcomes. Outcomes it has dictated to you, thereby controlling all of your choices and, in effect, eliminating them. It achieves this goal by influencing you to perceive the most elaborate of all misinterpretations. Time.”
Mercury represents the fluidity, fragility and relative nature of our realities. Our realities are based on memories, not on the linear timeline we live. We experience our lives through the prism of recollection and interpretation.
The naming of this drug is also a bit of giveaway, as it’s based on the Roman/Greek God of Mercury, who was the god of translators and interpreters.
Fred’s drug induced memory and reality breaks
Though extremely disorienting and anxiety inducing, the editing and intensity of scenes are an incredible way to convey the fear Fred’s mother must have felt her final days.
While it’s not possible to fully convey what aphasia would be like, Fred’s journey partly mirrors his mother’s experience in an empathetic way, and also serves to conveys Fred’s fear in confronting his mother’s illness.
Fred’s journey to acceptance
The audience is forced to travel through a disjointed timeline of multiple versions of Fred’s life. Instead of a linear progression, Fred’s story is carried by themes and free association — in exactly the same way memories fleet from one scene to the next in our heads.
His high school friends, though based on real memories of people, have now come to represent the various parts of Fred’s psyche as he deals with his grief: Regret, Denial, and Avoidance, all of which under the influence of Mercury, allow Fred to explore and interpret his memories unhindered.
Each scene moves Fred (and us) towards the final destination of unlocking the earliest childhood memory that Fred has of his mother. One that he initially recalled in a negative light but is resolved when he realises, in his mother’s final moments, it was the memory of his mother comforting him after a fall from the stairs and rewarding him with affection for learning from this lesson.
Comparisons with other movies
If you take the literal interpretation of this movie as many have, it would be a mix of The Matrix, Butterfly effect, and Requiem for a Dream.
But I’d argue the literal interpretation is incorrect, and the more appropriate comparisons are with Pink Floyd’s the Wall, Inside Out, and Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory.
