Disney+ Review - The Greatest Hits (2024)

It’s happened to all of us, that moment when we hear a song and it sends us straight back into our past. Romance, sadness, laughter ….. music can evoke just about any kind of memory and that’s the comfortably familiar idea behind The Greatest Hits. But it goes further. Inspired by Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, director/writer Ned Benson adds time travel to the mix and, while it brings a new angle, it’s also a thread which keeps threatening to unravel the whole thing.

Harriet (Lucy Boynton) is struggling to recover from the death of her boyfriend Max (David Corenswet) in a car crash. Living alone and surrounded by what’s left of her past, she’s found that music has started to trigger an unusual form of time travel. In a flash, she goes back to the same moment when the song concerned was playing: those times are always the happiest of times with him, making her more aware that she can do nothing to change things. She also goes to group counselling sessions, where she meets David (Justin H Min) but, while their relationship starts to develop, she has to find a way of letting go of the past so she can move forward. Her time travelling is holding her back.

With its foundation in grief and loss, The Greatest Hits combines them with a certain charm and warmth and the two go together surprisingly well, mostly managing to avoid unnecessary sentiment. As a portrayal of the aftermath of death, it’s drawn with tenderness and comion. Benson’s visual storytelling, moving from the glow of memory to the coldness of reality, is especially effective in creating the contrast in tone. And he’s helped by an appealing trio of lead actors, with the vulnerable Boynton oscillating between determination and confusion. The two men in her life are decidedly different, so it’s not hard to understand why she falls for them, even if the memories of Corenswet are so soft focus that we never get much more than an idealized version of his character.

It’s the time travel that knocks things off kilter. While it’s conventional, the idea of music evoking memories still works well and sits happily alongside the basis of the story. But, while sending Boynton back in time was meant to add to our understanding of music in our lives, in truth it adds little more than a touch of fantasy and one that undermines the film’s otherwise tidy structure. At times, it’s close to being a distraction, and one that robs an otherwise appealing, nostalgic romantic drama of its focus. But, then, memories can often be messy.