“Memory” belongs to what we might call the shake-and-bake school of movie-making. That is, you take the ingredients of a successful movie of a certain kind — or even, as in this case, more than one kind — put them together in a bag, and shake them up.

The director, Bennett Davlin, is also the co-producer and is adapting his own novel (with the help of Anthony Badalucco). As the creative control is so closely held, we must suppose that the random assortment of themes, images, and plot fragments he has dropped in the bag is his own idea and not something foisted on him by a studio.

Here, as nearly as I can make it out, is the recipe: First, take a mysterious corpse marked with symbols of some ancient people or religion and a bag of stuff containing clues as to the corpse’s life and how he became a corpse. Add the hero, a Harvard-trained doctor named Taylor Briggs (Billy Zane) who, only 10 years out of medical school, has his own research institute dedicated to the causes and potential cures of Alzheimer’s disease — from which, by the way, his mother suffers.

Add an ethnic sidekick, Dr. Deepra Chang (Terry Chen), to serve as the voice of science and skepticism when the hero starts developing his wild and unsubstantiated theories — which, of course, will all turn out to be true.

Set the plot in motion by having the hero prick his finger through his rubber gloves on something in the corpse’s bag of stuff. Soon after, he starts to have powerful hallucinations.

In the first instance, the hallucinations appear to be caused by a mysterious substance with which the corpse’s stuff is dusted. We’ll call this magic powder “magic powder.” It defies scientific analysis.

Science is also baffled by the corpse’s brain scan, which is “something we have never seen before” — a kind of cancer that seems to target only the memory centers.

With no scientific explanation for his hallucinations, the hero pursues his investigations into what might be causing them by looking into ancient religious lore. He discovers the corpse’s name and a master’s thesis concerning the same religious lore secreted in the bag of stuff.

The hero becomes convinced of something that everyone else regards as a psychotic delusion — namely, that in his hallucinations he is seeing the experiences of his ancestors through their eyes — again, he is right and medical science is wrong.

At this point, Messrs. Davlin and Badalucco must have decided that the ingredients had to be spiced up by the addition of that sure-fire commercial property: a serial killer, who, wearing a mask and a black Burberry raincoat, features in all the hero’s hallucinations. The ancient religious lore and the hero’s hunches suggest that this mysterious figure is Taylor’s own father, whom he never knew.

The serial killer has some obscure psychosexual hangups that drive him to kidnap little girls. At first, his predations are dated (with the help of a hallucinated newspaper) to 1971 — just before the hero’s birth. But then similar crimes are shown to have been committed up to the present day.

So the detective story becomes a search not just for the hero’s origins or the identity of his dead father but for some living bad guy. Accordingly, the film introduces new characters as potential villains, all of whom are in loving relationships with the hero.

These include two old friends of the hero’s mother — the avuncular Dr. Max Lichtenstein (Dennis Hopper) and the motherly Carol Hargrave (Ann-Margret) — and the hero’s love interest, the beautiful artist Stephanie Jacobs (Tricia Helfer), to whom he is first attracted because she has painted — coincidentally? — a figure who looks remarkably like the masked man in the Burberry raincoat. The bad guy is naturally the least likely of these.

The plethora of story fragments means that the hero’s detective work has to be hurried along, but it helps that the clues he needs are always surprisingly easy to find. Indeed, when he goes into a strange place to look for evidence, he usually finds it in the first place he looks, or even posted on the wall so he doesn’t have to look at all.

In the end, there is a kind of pretend denouement in which the villain is unmasked and the secret of the hero’s parentage is (sort of ) revealed, but in fact everything is left up in the air. None of these random elements really has anything to do with any other, except by virtue of having been shaken up in the same bag.

And if anyone can figure out a motive that makes any sense, either for the original killer-kidnapper in the Burberry raincoat or his heir, or what any of this has to do with memory except in the most superficial sense, please let me know.

jbowman@nysun.com