Dead Again (1991) on Netflix
A mute amnesiac woman is found at a Los Angeles orphanage, and private detective Mike Church sets out to learn her identity. She dreams of a pianist killed in 1948.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.8/1033,073 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes83%
Trailer
Plot summary
Mike Church works as a private detective in Los Angeles, where his specialty is locating missing people. The case he takes on is a woman who turned up at the orphanage that raised him: she cannot speak and remembers nothing, so he gives her the name Grace. Nightmares trouble her sleep, and in them a pianist named Margaret Strauss is stabbed in 1948 and Margaret's husband, the composer Roman Strauss, is condemned for the killing. Grace and Mike look remarkably like that couple. An antiques dealer and hypnotist, Franklyn Madson, offers hypnosis to unlock her memory, and when it fails he proposes past life regression. The session leaves Grace able to speak, still without her memory, and recounting Margaret and Roman's life as though it were someone else's.
Cast
- Patrick MontesDeOcaas Pickup Driver
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dead Again (1991)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Kenneth Branagh cut Dead Again five different ways over six months, with some versions testing too silly and others too bleak, and Paramount grew nervous about his black-and-white flashbacks until director Sydney Pollack personally persuaded the studio to allow them.
- Dead Again was actually shot entirely in color, but after test screenings the filmmakers decided to render the 1948 flashback scenes in black-and-white to stop audiences from confusing the two eras, with the final shot blooming back into color once the mystery is solved.
- To get the right tone, director Kenneth Branagh told his composer Patrick Doyle to model the score on the works Bernard Herrmann scored for Hitchcock's films: something big and bold and melodramatic.
- Dead Again's reincarnation storyline was later cited as one of the influences on Dream Theater's 1999 progressive-metal concept album Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory.
