In the case of DEAD AGAIN, Branagh and writer Scott Frank also throw reincarnation into the mix. The result, by rights, should be silly and irritating, but the result is one of the best suspense movies in years, and a worthy follow-up for Branagh to his debut film HENRY V. This also is one of the few films that can be favorably compared to Hitchcock - the Hitchock of REBECCA, in this case, for it shares that picture's gothic mood, at least half the time.
Frank's story involves a woman (Emma Thompson) who turns up at a church school one night. She can't speak, she can't remember who she is, and she has violent nightmares. The head priest calls Mike Church (Branagh), a missing persons detective who went to that school, to trace the woman's identity. Church takes the woman, whom he calls "Grace," to his photographer friend Pete (Wayne Knight), who puts her picture in the paper, but the only one to respond is Dr. Madsen (Derek Jacobi), an antiques dealer and hypnotist. Church thinks Madsen is a kook, especially when Grace's first memory when he regresses her is of 1948. But he allows Madsen to let Grace tell her story.
The story is of Roman (Branagh) and Margaret Strauss (Thompson), a conductor/composer and concert pianist, respectively, who meet and fall in love in 1948 L.A. Roman comes with a housekeeper, Inga (Hanna Schygulla), and her son Frankie (Gregor Hesse), whom Margaret grows to distrust, even though Roman says they saved his life during the war (Roman is a Jewish refugee). Roman, in turn, has become jealous of the attentions of Gray Baker (Andy Garcia), a newspaper reporter who's attracted to Margaret. One night, Margaret is stabbed to death with a pair of scissors, and Roman is convicted of the crime, and executed for it, but not before telling Baker, "This is all far from over."
