Plot summary

Sam Bloom goes by various names/aliases throughout, including Peter and Sam, which is slightly confusing at first. Sam is interested in a psychologist (Gordon Dunn) developing technology to extract your memories, so you or anyone can watch them clear as day, like a film clip, but unbiased by your own perceptions. Sam, personally, wants to use the device to remember his brother's last words. Viewers see a flashback: Sam's brother was a rock star who returned home to visit him, but after some time at a local bar, was killed in a car accident with Sam at the wheel. It's not entirely clear who was at fault, as is often the case with car accident scenes, but there was another car involved. While stalking Dunn (hoping for help to view this memory) and waiting outside his office, the inventor gets killed inside - and this sparks intrigue into who killed him. The majority of the film, Sam plays detective. The gimmick is that Sam builds scale models and he builds a model for the murder and figurines for each character involved his investigation - primarily, patients in the test phase of the device, and co-workers at the company manufacturing the device for profit. Sam visits and befriends the inventor's wife, Carolyn, on false pretenses, stealing the actual device from Dunn's office in her home, and views memories already saved by the test subjects, as research. Sam follows up by meeting with each test subject, and asking test patient Todd, who met with Dunn in his final moments, to don the headpiece and record his memory of their interaction. Sam also utilizes the device in an ongoing attempt to extract his own memories. As a side effect of using the device, Sam begins to have hallucinations of his dead brother; it appears as though the brother is there with him. The test subjects report having hallucinations and worse - it seemed to them as though memories were crashing into the present reality; one of the subjects even committed suicide. Another test subject had an affair with Dunn, and, based on Todd's memory of his exit from Dunn's office, turns out to be the very last person to have entered Dunn's office - Wendy - only she is not forthright with Sam. Sam decides to enlist Carolyn's help in the case (it turns out she knew about the affair and who with), and sets up a meeting for the wife to confront the mistress, during which Carolyn persuades Wendy to don the headset and show her perception of Dunn's last moments. We view Wendy's memory: Dunn was already dead when she entered the office, so she stole the device and brought it to his home office, to find her own memory cards (which are on glass discs) and retrieve them, but she is interrupted by Carolyn and escapes unseen out the back door. As we know, Sam later stole the device from the same room, before Carolyn discovered it was there. Wendy agreed to share this memory in exchange for her own memory discs, which she is given, and gives Carolyn her husband Dunn's personal memory disc, which Wendy had still had in her pocket when she fled Dunn's home office. On a beach where she and Dunn had once had a wonderful family day with their deceased daughter, Carolyn watches her dead husband's final memories, as he viewed memories of their dead young daughter and deleted them; Carolyn and Sam discover Dunn was killed by trying to delete too many painful memories from his own brain - and the process itself killed him. Carolyn puts Dunn's memory disc in a glass bottle, presumably to throw into the ocean, like a message in a bottle. Sam offers her his own memory disc, while apologizing - he says she'll understand exactly who he is if she watches. Sam's disc contains the full car accident memory, from his perspective, in which Sam's brother was not the only victim - Dunn, Carolyn and their daughter were in the other car, and she was killed, prompting Sam to flee the scene. However, Carolyn takes it and immediately adds it to the bottle, because Sam has helped her find some answers, and throws it into the sea.