Remember that 2000 film about amnesiac Guy Pearce getting tattoos and shooting people? Well hang on to those memories. Unless you have a friend who owns the DVD, the only way to legally watch Memento in Australia is via the Quickflix DVD/Blu-ray subscription. It isn’t streaming anywhere. I can’t find any Australian stores that stock it. If you want to watch it, you have to subscribe to Quickflix for $20 per month. And if you want to own it, you’re out of luck.
In my search for this film, I began to wonder if this was one of those phenomenons like Sinbad’s Shazam, wherein the film never existed yet a multitude of people have very clear memories of watching it. But there is an IMDb page. There is a Wikipedia page. My colleagues have corroborated my memories as well. The 2000 psychological thriller directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Guy Pearce and Carrie-Anne Moss definitely exists. It’s just ridiculously difficult for Australians to watch it.
Here is a list of streaming services that do not offer it in Australia:
- Netflix
- Stan
- Dendy Direct
- Presto
- iTunes
- Google Play
- Amazon Video
- Crackle
- Mubi
- PlayStation
- Microsoft Store
- YouTube
- Foxtel Play Anytime
- BigPond Movies
“That’s OK,” you may think. “I’ll just buy the Blu-ray instead.” Good luck with that. Here is a list of stores that do not stock it:
- JB Hi-Fi
- Sanity
- EzyDVD
- DVDLand
- Booktopia
- Done Dirt Cheap DVD
- Big W
Some of the stores and services on this list aren’t typically names that you’d first go to when looking for a film. That is because I started to get a little desperate. I thought that surely there should be multiple places to watch this film in Australia, or at the very least buy it. It wasn’t so niche that it would fade into obscurity.
Yet the only way I could find to watch this film was by Quickflix’s $20 per month DVD and Blu-ray mailing service.
So if you have a mighty need to see Guy Pearce search for his wife’s murderer while dealing with short term memory loss, you’d better get ready to pay $20, and wait a few days for the disc to arrive in the mail. It’s things like this that makes piracy so prevalent in Australia.