Every few hours the clocks show midnight, and the Strangers put their prodigious minds to work. All of this uncertainty is invigorating, even if it is occasionally confusing. But such thin plotting is okay, because it's the city itself that makes this film work. The city is incredible. And the city conforms to an irreducible, slippery, rather fascinating dream logic.
Nothing is what it looks like and nothing, especially identity, is stable.
This despite the fact that the story wants very much to resolve itself around John's successful self-discovery and the beginning of a whole new set of memories that will remain with him. It's a resolution that, given what's come before, doesn't cohere as well as it might. And that's the best thing that could have happened. All rights reserved.