A woman wakes up in a hospital bed with a broken body and a hole where the last six months were. Her husband was arrested for trying to kill her. Someone in her life did something terrible, and the only person who was definitely there, the only witness who can’t be bribed, coached, or subpoenaed to lie, is her. She is also the person least able to say what happened.
This is the configuration of This tempting madnessand that’s a good thing. The Amnesia thrillers were running this engine long before most of us were born. What makes this one different is a card that comes in the first minute and then quietly rearranges everything afterward. The film immediately tells us that it is inspired by a true story.
I had nine minutes with director Jennifer E. Montgomery, which is what a press day gets you, and I spent most of that time finding out how contrived the whole thing was. According to Montgomery, the dental equipment is real. The same goes for memory lapses. So is the diary that made it all possible, and it exists because Montgomery convinced her best friend to keep it under slightly false pretenses.
She kept the diary because someone asked her to
Montgomery said in other interviews that her friend came out of a coma capable of holding out for about sixty seconds at a time. What she told me was the next part of the story, the part where a filmmaker, with no intention of filming anything, begins pushing a survivor toward a notebook.
“I wanted her to keep the journal just so she could remember it for herself,” Montgomery said. “And the only way she keeps a diary is because she’s really someone who doesn’t like to do things for herself, but she’ll happily do them for other people. She says, well, I don’t need to keep a diary, but if you want to make a movie out of it, then I guess I can. And I’m like, OK, yeah, yeah, yeah, keep the diary. And because I’ll make a movie out of it. And I didn’t intend to do it.”
Sit with that for a second. The document at the center of this film exists because a woman who didn’t want to do anything for her own benefit agreed to do it for her friend’s imaginary project. A year later the memory returned, the notebook was full and the friend turned around and asked when the film was being written.
“At the time, I didn’t intend it, but at the same time, it’s there,” Montgomery said. “And she says, I want you to do this. I worked so hard. You encouraged me to do this. You said you were going to do it. That’s why I wrote this diary.”
Montgomery pays attention to the issue of consent and she raised it before me. “She didn’t need to trick me in any way. It was just me wanting to make sure that this was a story that she really wanted to tell because it’s very personal.”
Your mind keeps what it wants
The film gives you information the same way Mia gets it, which is to say confidently and falsely. I spent the runtime being sure I understood it, and then being punished for it every twelve minutes or so. When I asked her how she decided what the public was allowed to know, Montgomery went somewhere I didn’t expect, which directly corresponds to how ordinary memory works.
“So memory is such a strange thing,” she said. “For example, if you’re just trying to think back to your own memory, something that’s even a strong memory that you think you know everything about, you’re not experiencing it in real time. It’s not every second of what happened. Your mind remembers what it chooses to hold on to.”
He is not a poetic filmmaker. This is remarkably close to how memory researchers describe reconstructive memorywhere recall is not a literal reading of the past but a reconstruction shaped by stored information, prior knowledge and expectations. Montgomery built his structure there.
“And when you remove a few moments from a memory, or moments from a moment, it changes everything,” she said. “So what you see is what she remembers, or what her mind allows her to remember at that moment. But when she can remember a little more, it’s different. It changes. And so her mind conveniently lets go of things and forms what it wants to form versus what maybe reality is.”
Ideally. This word does a lot of work. This transforms the mind from a damaged instrument into something with an agenda, and it’s where the film stops being a mystery about an abuser and becomes something nastier. We have a whole bunch of movies about being trapped in someone else’s version of reality. This traps you in yours, which proves more difficult to escape, because there is no one to escape from.
The screws were real
There’s a sequence involving dental equipment that made me sit forward, and not in a fun way. I mentioned this to Montgomery primarily as a compliment on the direction. She took him somewhere else.
“Oh, yeah, it’s real. His jaw was broken,” she said. “That’s when the screw came out. That’s something that happened. Like she was texting me a picture. She’s like, oh look, I’m a Terminator now, screws are coming out of my jaw.”
The gallows humor is the friend’s, not the movie’s, and it tells you something about the person the movie is based on. Montgomery’s point was about the consequences rather than the injury. “In the film, it’s a horrible thing because the process of returning is so painful.”
Horror speaks wounds fluently. It’s much worse in terms of healing, which is slow, not very photogenic and full of appointments. A film that finds its most upsetting material in recovery rather than assault does something the genre almost never bothers to do.
The Phoenix in the Orange Dress
If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the orange dress. I assumed it was a stylist’s victory. I didn’t know that, it’s a thesis statement.
“It wasn’t just a movie about one person’s downfall,” Montgomery said. “It was a movie about someone rising like a phoenix. And that’s why we have the big orange dress, the flaming wing like a plume, because we really wanted it to be a phoenix falling and rising from the ashes. And she really chose to do that every day with this physical therapy and all this dental work that was no fun at all to do.”
Montgomery clearly explains why a story like this became a genre picture rather than a drama. “It’s a genre film. And it’s built to be exciting and, you know, with elements of horror, but at the same time it deals with very serious topics in a subversive way.” The horror manages to smuggle. Strange Darling used the framing of a fictionalized true story as part of its opening misdirection. Here the claim carries, and the smuggling goes the other way, with real payback hidden in a thriller so people can actually watch it.
She says it landed. “A lot of people came up to us after seeing it at different film festivals and told us how much it had an impact on them because they related to various elements of the film.”
Everyone is a suspect and everyone is a person
The film holds its cards until late, and it does so without turning the actors into furniture, which is the usual cost of this structure. Montgomery takes credit.
“When you make a movie, you write it several times. You write it as a script. You write it as you film it. And then you write it as you edit it.” She worked on this project with editor Kiran Pallegadda, which received spontaneous approval. “Very emotionally sensitive, you just have to go through trial and error. And it’s crazy, you change one tiny thing and it reads for the audience totally different.”
That’s the whole problem with the amnesia thriller in one sentence. Every frame is a potential tell-all, and Kryptic hit the same wall on the opposite side, holding back until the audience floated.
On the whole, where almost everyone seems to be doing something they’re not actually doing, she gave the most revealing answer of the interview. “It was a very personal process for me. These were all people I knew well. And they were all people I wanted to be kind to and serve and bring to life.”
People she knew well. Not archetypes, not suspects. The film’s most tortuous machinery is populated by her friend’s real-life circle, and the instructions she gave herself were to be nice to them while making them seem guilty. It’s a strange mission, and it explains why the supporting characters continue to resist the forms the plot wants to push them into.
Montgomery makes her directorial debut here, from a screenplay she wrote with cinematographer Andrew M. Davis, who is also her husband. Simone Ashley leads opposite Austin Stowell, with Suraj Sharma, Mojean Aria, Amol Shah and Zenobia Shroff.
This tempting madness is available digitally and in select US theaters since June 12 via Vertical. He reaches UK digital platforms today, August 10, via Plaion Picturescertificate 15.
What I have left is not the solution. This is the thing that Montgomery kept circling, that a self-protecting mind will edit, and it will edit convincingly, and the protected person has no way of checking the work. Her friend collected most of it and made a film of it. Most people don’t have one either.
