Critic Reviews

Remake is extraordinarily clear-eyed for a work so broken-hearted: at once a home movie, an intimate diary and an expansive study of the filmmaker’s purpose, constantly disrupting its own conclusions with expressions of anger, amusement and still-unresolved confusion.

As the title suggests, Remake is really about McElwee going back over a life captured on film and creating something new from it: an elegy, a gift and something of an apology to his lost son. As such, it’s devastating. As a meditation on memory and the passage of time, it is stunning.

In exquisite, excruciating detail, Remake captures all the beauty and the pain.

Remake is emotionally shattering.

This is a film full of the sprawl of life, of its swerves and detours and maddening sense of timing.

As the camera turns from father to son and back again, “heartbreaking” becomes too flat a word to describe this contemplative film.

Remake may be a film about death and loss and grief, but it’s not one of conclusions. In the end, McElwee does something perhaps unexpected but also heartbreaking and indescribably generous: He preserves the mystery of his son’s life.

Remake isn’t as much a film as it is a eulogy that took a decade to write. It’s a tribute crafted the only way McElwee knows how–through deeply vulnerable, intimate, visual storytelling that pulls the audience through his cycle of grief right alongside him. This is not only his goodbye to Adrian, it’s his way of immortalizing him. While his life was cut short, his memory is now preserved forever.

All McElwee has are the images that Adrian left behind, and in Remake, he has found a way to process them into something profound and powerful that illustrates not a perfect relationship, but certainly the sort of true magic a camera can offer to remind us who we were, and the great beauty in seeing another person through the lens of true unconditional love.

The end result is a profoundly moving work, one that will resonate with anyone who is a parent or close to a troubled kid, but one that has so much more about the making of art, its joys and its dishonesties. It lingers in the mind long after the tears have dried.