The Tourist review: Jamie Dornan’s amnesia thriller has an assured slyness to it

Language: English

The Tourist’s premise isn’t particularly novel, but it holds a fascinating question at its core. If someone ‘bad’ loses all memories of their past life, can they go on to become ‘better’ people? Can a person’s fundamental nature change, if their past conditioning and preconceived notions about the world are erased? In the six-part series, currently streaming on Lionsgate Play, we get to the answers to the above questions in a languorous way.

The first scene of the show is reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s Duel, given how our protagonist (Jamie Dornan) is chased by an 18-wheeler truck on the dusty highways of Australia. Just when he seems to have out-run his fate, the showrunners pull the rug from under our feet. Our leading man is rendered without a memory, and all he knows is a note that he found in his pocket about meeting in a diner, in a faraway town on a pre-set date and time. The show mimics a Liam Neeson action-thriller here, but there’s almost a real-life sloppiness that it brings with it. Nothing is ‘neat’ in The Tourist.

As our unnamed protagonist hobbles his way out of the hospital on crutches to get to the diner meeting, desperately trying to piece together his life, he realises that he might also be the target of some dangerous people. While one might be reminded of Jason Bourne films or Memento, it’s also impossible to miss the amusement on the faces of the showrunners, who almost seem to be winking at their audience after delivering every twist.

Jamie Dornan’s character runs into a series of interesting people, as he tries to retrace his steps from a few days ago to get a sense of who he is, trying to find anyone who might be able to tell him his name, or who he used to be. “It’s almost like me trying to fly…” the protagonist tells a cop, when she asks him to ‘try harder’ to remember his name. There’s a helplessness in how Dornan delivers the line.

The cop he’s speaking to, is an under-probation traffic constable Helen Chambers (Danielle MacDonald) who has taken out her brand new notepad, to work on her career’s first case while assisting a Detective. MacDonald, who was a discovery for many on Netflix’s Unbelievable, is shown to be struggling with problems of her own — an abusive partner, and an addiction to junk food. As she becomes an unexpected ally to the unnamed protagonist, she realises that he might not be as innocent as he claims. The protagonist might not be at fault here because even ‘strangers’ who have agreed to help him get his identity back, haven’t been entirely honest.

There are many expected character outlines in a story like this – the ingenue-turned-femme fatale (Shalom Brun-Franklin), the assassin (Olafur Darri Olafsson) who interviews each person as if he’s going to put a bullet into them soon after. The world-weary cop (Damon Herriman) who has spent his lifetime trying to go about his duty only to realise what truly matters near the end of his long career. The mercurial drug lord (Alex Dimitrades) who barks orders in Spanish only to momentarily switch to pristine English to contain his rage. These are all stock characters for a formulaic plot, but The Tourist manages to cultivate its own texture, which only good shows can do.
It doesn’t seem to be rushing from one plot point or reveal to another. Instead, it takes the scenic route of storytelling using Australia’s long, unending highways, their notorious and exotic wildlife, and the beating sun of an Australian summer – all of which are a character on the show.

The Tourist has an assured slyness to it, where it serves you with an engaging, but familiar plot, of a man who has lost his memory, and realises he’s being hunted. And just when you’re invested enough to predict what will happen next, they play with expectations. Like a character says about human nature, that we only turn it inside out, and continue to remain the same. “Like Underpants?”, our protagonist asks and bursts out laughing. What else is a clever ‘genre’ piece if not something familiar turned inside out?

All episodes of The Tourist are currently streaming on Lionsgate Player.

Tatsam Mukherjee has been working as a film journalist since 2016. He is based out of Delhi NCR.

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