Amnesia

Nobody does mysteries like the British, whose dominance in the genre dates back to the late 19th century with the birth of Sherlock Holmes. This 2003 telefilm is about as far from the Conan Doyle format as one can get, but it's a taut puzzler just the same. John Hannah stars as Detective Sergeant Mack Stone, consumed by grief and galled over his inability to find his wife, who's been missing for three months. On top of that, Stone's grip on reality is slowly slipping—the man has a drinking problem, and given the facts that his wife left during an argument and Stone can't exactly recall what happened, he fears that he himself may be the killer. At least until he becomes fixated on amnesiac John Dean (Anthony Calf), whom he eventually believes is the murderer—feigning forgetfulness to cover up his crime. Chris Lang's script is admirably twisty, and the acting is uniformly excellent—Hannah, a fine dramatic actor, will surprise stateside viewers who only know him as the bumbling sidekick in the recent The Mummy movies, while Calf also shines, as does Jemma Redgrave as Dean's faithful but increasingly perplexed wife. More of a grim and tense psychological thriller than a routine whodunit, Nick Laughland's Amnesia grabs the viewer from the first reel. Recommended. (E. Hulse)