THEY REMAIN – Review

Review by Mark Longden

THEY REMAIN opened theatrically New York (Village East Cinema) on Friday, March 2 and Los Angeles (Laemmle Music Hall) on Friday, March 9 with a national release to follow.

I like the recent blurring of the line between arthouse and genre thriller. I remember reading Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” and everyone got excited that a real serious literary author had written a vampire novel; then the incredibly talented Colson Whitehead wrote “Zone One”. These helped open People are now realizing that you can make a proper, serious movie, with big themes, and have the subject matter be pretty much whatever you like.

I was about to use “Black Mirror” as a further comparison, but then I realized the two things are actually a really good match. Laird Barron wrote short story “-30-”, which would have made a splendid episode of TV, and then producers Peter Askin and Will Battersby, along with writer / director Philip Gelatt, made it into a movie. While I’m not sure it works perfectly at feature length, it’s a fascinating story, superbly acted by its two leads which gives us plenty to think about.

In THEY REMAIN, a bunch of odd, modular-looking tents are set up in a clearing in a forest, and two people are left there by a helicopter. Keith (William Jackson Harper) is a serious-looking guy who’s brought along a non-company rifle (there are lots of wonderful little gadgets with the company’s branding on it); Jessica (Rebecca Henderson) is a no-nonsense scientist who speaks a little too quickly. The two of them have been dispatched to an unknown location in an unknown place to perform a frustratingly unspecified task – perhaps something to do with testing the ground for unusual chemical compounds, perhaps to do with analyzing animal behavior, perhaps to investigate the remains of a cult which once called that area home (or an even older group from early colonial days). Or maybe it’s all of them, or maybe the two of them are the subjects of the test and not the people carrying it out.

We’re treated to lots of intense, vivid closeups of wilderness, with mostly Keith wandering about in them, setting up cameras and taking soil samples. Jessica stays mostly in the base and looks at screens, also intensely. And slowly, gradually, things start going wrong. The cameras don’t work; or they give out heat signature readings which are wrong; Jessica starts hearing knocks at the door which is surprising as there’s no-one within hundreds of miles. The information from base is cryptic and unhelpful, and when they have supplies airlifted in (and some of their unusual finds airlifted out) the helicopter pilot (a magnificent, creepy, just the right side of OTT performance from Alex Mills) hints that the rest of the world is not quite as it should be.

Perhaps inevitably, Keith and Jessica start a relationship, although IMDB tells me they were previously romantically linked – perhaps I missed that bit? Anyway, there’s an immediacy and intensity to it which nicely links with the increasing oddity of their mission. When they find a giant tusk of some prehistoric monster, next to their tents, and Keith finds a cave-hole which he stakes out but doesn’t go into, the sense of unreality really ratchets up.

The great modern classic of “two people trapped together end up losing their minds in a weird mutual way” has already been made, with William Friedkin’s “Bug”, and this doesn’t go to quite the extremes that movie did. It’ can be a little inconsistent – witness the fury when they find out a CSI team was recently in the area looking for cult evidence, but then witness the casual way they brush off that the CSI team may well have gone crazy and murdered each other.

There were hallucinations / flashbacks that I don’t think worked, and sort of combined red herring / twist ending that I was, honestly, a little annoyed by. THEY REMAIN looks beautiful, and there’s an interesting plot there, just not quite enough to make a feature film out of.