An OnDemand viewing on July 21st in Chicago. I don't know how the rest of you out there come up with a streaming choice but at our house it takes awhile. We run through Netflix, HULU, Amazon Prime, HBO Now, iTunes and OnDemand. My wife played this trailer, we looked around some more and finally came back to it.
The picture is directed by Philip Gelatt, he also wrote the screenplay, and is based a short story by Laird Barron. Set sometime in the future, Rebecca Henderson and William Jackson Harper are investigating the site of a murderous cult that apparently cause a lot of havoc years ago. They set up cameras, run soil samples and even discover some human remains. There's some distrust for the corporation the work for and they both seem to have vivid dreams. Things slowly breakdown as weird things start to happen; the cameras malfunction periodically, they hear things, and there's a similarity of their weird dreams. Eventually, they both slowly descend into madness.
They Remain received a 61% Rotten Tomatoes Rating which means its somewhere between meh and mediocre. It's more on the meh side in my opinion. It's not a bad film but there's a lot lacking. The film's run time is 102 minutes but it's more slow than a slow burn. Other than dream imagery, there isn't a lot of exposition on the murderous cult. It's also hard to differentiate sometimes which is a dream and which is reality. Gelatt tries to build the tension but falls flat most of the time. There are some interesting and creepy scenes but they're few and far between. The film's ending left me with a "so what just happened" feeling.
Gelatt could be someone to keep an eye on. He wrote the screenplay for Europa Report so he knows his way around creepy sci-fi. The acting is fine and the film is sound technically. Maybe the source material is not that fantastic. With the amount of time we spent looking for a film to view, They Remain didn't payoff.
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