Remember This

Nick and Helen are in the attic looking through old photographs and reminiscing about the stories surrounding each one. Smiles on camera can hide a hundred cracks, it seems.

Not that Remember This is the story of a rocky relationship – they just face the same slings and arrows that affect everyone. It's all terribly recognisable and Paul Brotherson—as the scruffy Nick—and Daisy Badger—playing his dream ice queen Helen—do a good job of convincing us of the underlying love beneath this slightly stilted reunion. She stays stock still nursing a cup of tea whilst he buzzes around the projector anxious to make it all work. Nick adores Helen while she remains coolly aloof throughout, though Badger is able to bring gravitas to her own tender proclamation to him.

Lizzie Bourne’s script is based on the neat theatrical conceit of memory, and she fully utilises the warmth that nostalgia brings to any subject. We wander through Nick and Helen’s history of first dates, fairground rides and baby birthdays. There is a twist of course, and it’s a foreseeable one in what is a rather hackneyed format. But Bourne has a skill for fluid dialogue and the rhythm between these two lovers is wholly realistic. In the end, we are sufficiently interested in them to still care by the final photograph, which—as anyone who's ever been made to sit through someone else's photo slideshow knows—is no mean feat.