I wonder if the makers of Complete Unknown were as allured and intrigued by the movie’s central character, Alice (Rachel Weisz), as they expect us to be. Alice is a lazy screenplay’s idea of a deep, complicated, thoroughly interesting woman—she’s altered her identity multiple times, traveled around the world, changed her name, and taken up several new professions. But instead of being a thickly woven tapestry of experience and complexity, Alice is a blank slate, a nothing of a person. Alice is a dud.
So’s Complete Unknown. Its premise—which contains some amount of promise and mystery—is dead on arrival, because it’s so far outside the realm of possibility as to be laughable. Among her many lives, Alice has been a nurse, a botanist, a Chinese magician’s assistant, and a pierced, rainbow-highlighted Portlander (a persona that drew laughs from a local preview audience).