Review: A past-obsessed, underwater world in 'Reminiscence'

Lisa Joy’s “Reminiscence” is set in a mostly submerged Miami in the near future, with canals flowing through high-rises in some sections

Just as surely as climate change is scaring the land and warming the seas, it is also flooding our movies. The planet's imperiled future has been in the DNA of disaster movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” for years, of course. But lately, climate has taken a more leading role in films proliferating as quickly as ice caps are melting. This summer has seen the parched, Australian thriller “The Dry” (good movie, by the way) and “The Tomorrow War,” a time-traveling war movie that leads to an apocalyptic threat unlocked by thawing permafrost. In Lisa Joy's “Reminiscence,” which debuts in theaters and on HBO Max on Friday, the first thing we see is water. The movie is set in a mostly submerged Miami in the near future, with canals flowing through high-rises in some sections. In other areas braced by an ocean wall, there are perpetual puddles. To escape the daytime heat, the city has also turned nocturnal. Or, at least, more so. What would it be like living in such a world? It's reasonable, maybe even responsible to consider it. Joy, who wrote and directed the movie, has sensibly concluded we would probably spend a lot of time remembering better days. In “Reminiscence," she has fashioned a shadowy, future-set film noir, with all the genre trappings of a hardboiled narrator, a slinky femme fatale, Venetian blinds and, most relevantly, a sense of the past's irrevocable hold over our lives — and our planet's.