Dead Again

Branagh's lame stab at a romantic psychological thriller makes no sense. Sloppily constructed and cut, riddled with clichés and cant, it tells the old tale of a tough, wisecrackin' LA private eye (Branagh) hired to discover the identity of a mute, amnesiac woman (inevitably Thompson). Her nightmares derive from a violent past, from which, it seems, only an eccentric hypnotist (Jacobi) can free her. The none-too-plausible and unexplained twist is that Em's flashbacks are to a previous life (1949) when she was a famous pianist and Ken was her famous composer hubby, who was executed for her murder. The leads are dreadful, and Garcia as a news-hack who fires the muso's jealousy, Schygulla as the muso's loyal German housekeeper, and Williams as the dick's defrocked shrink pal are all awfully misused. Could it be that nothing - not the overbearingly 'Hitchcockian' score, nor the OTT art direction - must distract our attention from the subtext: that Ken and Em are destined to dance through eternity together?