History Film / Mindscape

John Washington (Strong) is a recently widowed man who works for Mindscape, a detective agency that employs [[PsychicPowers psychics]] with the ability to enter people's memories to solve criminal cases. Being one of its best agents, and in need for money due to his personal troubles, Washington asks for a case, and is given that of Anna Greene (Farmiga), a brilliant but troubled 16-year-old girl from a disgustingly rich family who is on a hunger strike and has possibly attacked family members. By entering Anna's memories, Washington has the task of determining if she is a victim of dark schemes or a manipulative sociopath herself. Things then become muddled.

* AmbiguouslyEvil: Anna. [[spoiler:Subverted at the end. She’s more amoral that evil, given that she chose the least harmful route for her plan and ensured that Washington wouldn't ultimately pay from the crime she framed him for.]]

** It is unclear [[spoiler:how much of any character's testimony and perspective is factual, given that the process Mindscape uses to enter someone's memories fundamentally alters those, thus creating an entire cast of {{Unreliable Narrator}}s. Washington didn't even know he was reliving his previous memories for most of the film. Everyone except him also has a motivation to lie and obfuscate the truth: Anna could be just a murderous sociopath or a genius heiress caught in the midst of a conspiracy to deprive her of her inheritance, Sebastian is apparently a liar and could have played some shady role in Anna’s development, and the girls poisoned by Anna in their private school had their own reasons to accuse her, so what exactly transpired there goes unanswered.]]
** [[spoiler:Anna proves to be the mastermind her parents accuse her of being, but her own accusations about how she is being framed as a madwoman in order to discredit her and deprive her of her old money are left uncontested by the end of the film. Given that the two lectures are not mutually incompatible and her theory is actually very believable from the clues we are given, the case of both of them being true is entirely possible. ]]
** [[spoiler:Is Anna's intelligence which enables her to fabricate memories, or does she have psychic training as well? It's revealed that Sebastian, the head of the Mindscape psychic detective agency, was her therapist since childhood and clearly played some role in developing her mind, but for some reason he hides it from Washington and never really clarifies it. If he was just her therapist, then he's not a very good one, but if Anna was being groomed and trained in something more, possibly into a future Mindscape recruit herself or some other government experiment to utilize her precocious genius, then everything being kept highly secret and Anna locked up makes suddenly much more sense. ]]
** Related to the previous point, [[spoiler: the scene where a little girl addresses Sebastian as her uncle at a cocktail party might go unnoticed for the average viewer, but the fact that the little girl is dressed in an outdated lace dress identical to the one Anna wore as a child when Sebastian visited her implies there is definitely ''something'' about this. Is Sebastian simply attending a family party? Is he hanging out with wealthy people looking for potential clients for Mindscape? Or is he scouting another snob couple whom he might convince to subject their child to psychic training, as Anna might have been?]]

** An in-universe report states Anna suffers from "depression, bipolar disorder and narcissism". Assuming this is a single diagnosis and not a psychiatric history, it would be fundamentally impossible by modern psychological criteria (DSM-V and ICD-10) because the standards to qualify for depression exclude the ones for bipolar disorder and vice versa. To put it in very simple words, ''depression'' is a period of sustained low mood, while ''bipolar disorder'' is a period of low mood alternating with very elevated mood; in this case, if a depressed patient had episodes of elevated mood, it would be considered to be bipolar disorder, and if he did not, it would be depression.
* BadassNormal: Apparently. [[spoiler:While Anna never displays tangible psychic powers, her mind is powerful enough to hijack the memory-viewing process and create effectively indistinguishable fake memories. Though one does wonder whether that is really the case, giving Sebastian's unrevealed background as her therapist and the question whether the Anna that Washington saw near his apartment was a projection of his own psyche or perhaps Anna projecting herself there mentally.]]
* BitchInSheepsClothing: [[spoiler:Subverted in Anna’s case, as he is unusually honest from the beginning about her ability to think like a sociopath.]]

* DeadpanSnarker: Anna and Ortega have some impressive moments of snarking.

* FilleFatale: While she is not overly trying to seduce Washington like most examples, Anna is flirtatious and suggestive enough to qualify, and the question of whether she was ever actually sexually abused as a prepubescent child, a typical background for those characters, is left eerily ambiguous. Her former teacher Ortega accuses her of being one, claiming that she seduced him into taking the pornographic photographs of Anna for which he was convicted, although the fact that the guy was apparently forcing many other female students to do the same casts his words into doubt. At the end, the reality seems to be complex: [[spoiler:while Anna eventually accomplishes her goal to escape her family and their virtual compound of a private estate by manipulating Washington emotionally, their relationship never takes on a romantic or sexual dimension, as he rebuffs her explicit flirtations without hesitation, and from Anna's perspective Washington is a colleague of her therapist Sebastian and complicit with him and her parents in keeping her confined and discredited.]]
* IKnowYoureWatchingMe: Anna's memory self (and by the extension, herself) realizes Washington is in her mind when she takes a look at his mind self. Although Washington admits this is not necessarily a sign of the process going awry (and [[spoiler:Washington himself does it later by seeing Lundgren]]), it leads him to suspect she might try to disguise her memories to fool him.
* InformedFlaw: Anna's official diagnosis is "depression, bipolar disorder and narcissism". While the last one is debatably [[spoiler:accurate, proven by her manipulative tendencies and probably caused by her potentially abusive childhood, something Anna's family and her therapist Sebastian are suspiciously quick to denounce the possibility of]], we never get to see under her cynic, pseudo-cheery outlook to assess the other two.

* LeftHanging: [[spoiler:Was Anna a socipath or not? The film doesn't answer it directly. That said, there are some hints she is not: if she was truly a sociopath with nothing to lose, she could've just murdered her parents, or at least her stepfather whom she despised, and let Washington take the blame, but instead she merely poisoned them and then ensured Washington's freedom by sending him a photo proving she was alive and well. There's also her line about how she is not a sociopath, but just "smart enough to think like one".]]

* TeenGenius: Anna is incredibly perceptive and inquisitive, knows a lot about psychology and is a great artist. [[spoiler: And actress.]]