Recursion

In 2018, Barry Sutton, a detective with the NYPD, witnesses the suicide of Ann Voss Peters, who has FMS—a mysterious ailment in which victims gain alternate memories.

Barry has lunch with his ex-wife, Julia, on what would have been their late daughter Meghan’s 26th birthday.

While investigating Ann’s false memories, Barry is enticed to the strange Hotel Memory, where business magnate Marcus Slade captures him and forcibly sends him back to the day Meghan died in 2007. Barry saves Meghan. He relives his life all the way through 2018.

Once Barry reaches the day he visited Hotel Memory in the previous timeline, the memories from that timeline “catch up,” so Julia, Meghan, and everyone affected by the alternate timeline gain additional memories. Overwhelmed by the memory of dying as a teenager, Meghan commits suicide. A grief-stricken Barry prepares to raid Hotel Memory.

In 2007, Helena Smith, a neuroscientist specializing in memory, begins working for Marcus Slade on an isolated oil rig. She creates a chair that allows the subject to re-experience a previously recorded memory. Slade is not satisfied and pushes the team to invent a deprivation tank that makes it possible to literally reenter memories by dying in the present and traveling back in time.