Michel Franco’s underseen 2022 film Sundown offered something like an O. Henry spin on Succession — a slender but substantial beach read of a movie, an attention-seizing mood piece of malice and melancholy and a belly-filling meal of a role for lead actor Tim Roth. Did it push its melodramatic momentum a bit too far? Perhaps, but it also pulled the film’s tides away from traditional patterns.

Much like the mundane moniker Sundown, Franco’s follow-up, Memory, is titled like millions of other movies (including the one where Guy Pearce goes through a window). Franco doubles down on the acting showcase by crafting a two-hander for Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard. And once again, he’s attempting a bit of a rope-a-dope on what the movie actually is. To wit, its boilerplate plot description:

“Sylvia (Chastain) is a social worker who leads a simple and structured life. This is blown open when Saul (Sarsgaard) follows her home from their high school reunion. Their surprise encounter will profoundly impact both of them as they open the door to the past.”

Ah, “profoundly impact.” That old saw, meant to evoke a sense of mystery about the meat of the movie and suggest some sobering insight about the human condition. Instead, it reflects the superficial, sophomoric failures of an artfully dolled-up weepie of the week that can waste all the Oscar-winning talent, dangle all the dangerous subtext and embrace all the edge it wants. It’s still an artfully dolled-up weepie of the week. That plot synopsis plays coy only because the truth would otherwise set you up for Val Kilmer and Mira Sorvino in At First Sight or, worse yet, Richard Gere and Winona Ryder in Autumn in New York.

The latter film could also describe the setting of Memory, which at least looks authentic thanks to cinematographer Yves Cape’s relaxed, observational style. Somewhere in here is the nugget of a believably tough tale about the positive perseverance of affection and intimacy among people who have slogged through emotional sludge for so long. Chastain and Sarsgaard are also so well matched to each other’s strengths  — her garotte-wire tension and hypervigilance playing off his laconic relaxation that could reveal something sweet or sinister — that the pairing would seem to transcend the clumsily communicated material.

Unfortunately, their dynamic gets bogged down by a narratively over-cluttered, emotionally unbelievable and deathly paced narrative that is beneath Chastain, Sarsgaard and, well, pretty much everyone else in it. (And there are a lot of other fine performers in thankless roles, from Jessica Harper as a domineering mother to Josh Charles as an equally domineering brother and Merritt Wever as a clueless sister, and even Eighth Grade’s Elsie Fisher as a plot-functionary niece.)

Franco also wastes the first act on a clumsily manufactured assumption of aggression that takes nearly 45 minutes to resolve, hurtles through a second act of unlikely emotional choices and, like the preferred cinema of Dennis Reynolds, just sort of ends. Where Sundown had its zag and zig down to distract you from its true intentions, Memory is perpetually stalling for time until it gets to what it (perhaps futilely) hopes will be respective Oscar clips for its very talented lead performers. They have been great before. They likely will be again. This will be just another Memory.