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, like all of McElwee’s personal cinema, embody the passage of time itself. In other words, it’s the stuff of life.

Once again, McElwee finds a throughline that’s both deeply personal to his experience and universal to just about anyone who has lost someone close.

McElwee probes the very idea of memory itself, and in perhaps his crowning achievement as a documentarian, fails to come up with any definitive answers, yet somehow still moves closer to the truth than he ever had before.