‘Affection’ (2026) Review – A Promising Memory-Loss Sci-Fi Undone By Predictability

Memory-loss thrillers practically live or die on tension. You need to feel unstable alongside the main character, constantly questioning what’s real, what’s being hidden, and whether the truth is actually going to justify all the confusion surrounding it. Affection understands that structure well enough on paper, but the problem is that it reveals its hand far too early, leaving it stuck dragging itself toward a destination you can already see coming miles away.

Written and directed by BT Meza, the film follows Ellie (Jessica Rothe), a woman suffering from a mysterious condition that repeatedly resets her memory. She wakes up disoriented, unable to recognize her surroundings, her supposed husband Bruce, or even parts of her own identity. Bruce (Joseph Cross) patiently explains her condition, guiding her through routines meant to keep her calm while insisting he’s trying to help her hold onto whatever fragments of herself remain.

Naturally, Ellie begins suspecting something is wrong, and the film keeps its scope extremely small. Most of it unfolds inside isolated spaces, focused almost entirely on the interactions between Ellie and Bruce, and that controlled approach could have worked really well for this kind of story. There’s an intimacy to the setup that lends itself naturally to paranoia. Ellie doesn’t know who she can trust, and because her memory keeps resetting, she can’t build certainty long enough to hold onto it. The film wants the audience trapped inside that cycle with her.

And to an extent, it succeeds because Jessica Rothe does a tremendous amount of heavy lifting. Her performance is easily the strongest thing here. What makes it work isn’t just the emotional side of it, but the physicality. Rothe constantly adjusts how Ellie carries herself depending on what she thinks she understands in a given moment. Sometimes she wakes up terrified, sometimes exhausted, sometimes cautiously hopeful. Even when the script starts spinning its wheels, she keeps the character emotionally grounded. Without her, I honestly think the film completely falls apart.

What hurts Affection most is how obvious everything feels. Bruce is written with such immediate suspicion that there’s barely any ambiguity surrounding him, and the movie clearly wants viewers questioning whether he’s telling the truth, but it pushes so hard in that direction that it stops feeling like a mystery almost immediately. You spend most of the runtime waiting for Ellie to catch up to conclusions the audience has already made within the first act.

That creates a real pacing problem because the movie is very slow. Again, slowness itself isn’t an issue; some of the best psychological thrillers are patient. The difference is that those films are usually layering new information, deepening character psychology, or constantly reshaping your understanding of events. Affection mostly repeats the same cycle over and over with minor variations. Ellie wakes up confused, Bruce explains things, Ellie notices inconsistencies, suspicion grows, repeat. There’s a deliberate rhythm to it, but eventually it starts feeling less hypnotic and more exhausting and tedious.

The frustrating part is that the premise itself is genuinely strong. There’s a disturbing idea at the center of the film about identity, grief, and the lengths people will go to hold onto someone they love. You can feel the movie reaching toward themes about loss and emotional desperation, especially once the truth becomes clearer. But the screenplay never fully develops the emotional history needed to make those ideas hit harder. There’s a lack of backstory that becomes more noticeable as the film goes on. You understand the mechanics of what’s happening long before you understand the emotional reality behind it.

Joseph Cross also struggles in a role that desperately needed a more layered performance. To his credit, he’s clearly committed, but the character is written and played so suspiciously from the start that it limits the film’s tension. There’s never a believable sense that Bruce could simply be a grieving husband trying to care for someone he loves. The performance keeps nudging you toward distrust, which weakens the intended uncertainty.

One thing the film does get right visually is the practical effects work. There are a few sequences where the body horror elements briefly push the movie into something much more unsettling. Meza handles those moments carefully without overdoing them, and they provide the film with some badly needed texture during its slower stretches.

Still, by the time the inevitable reveal arrives, it doesn’t really land with much force because the movie hasn’t hidden it particularly well. The issue isn’t that the twist is impossible not to predict; plenty of good films are predictable. The issue is that the entire narrative is built around waiting for that reveal to happen, and once it does, there isn’t much else underneath it.There’s enough here to admire on a technical level, especially Rothe’s performance and the commitment to a controlled atmosphere. But Affection never becomes as psychologically gripping as it wants to be. It’s a film that mistakes withholding information for suspense, and there’s a difference between the two.

Affection is currently playing in select theaters courtey of Brainstorm Media. 

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