Sommerleigh Pollonais, Horror Head Writer
Plot: A high school student and her friends are trapped in a time loop by a ghost and the only way to escape is to find the corpse of the ghost’s previous victim.
Review: Netflix’s latest foray into Japanese horror is actually a remake of an animated television series, 2017’s Karada Sagashi, something I didn’t know until I checked out this movie’s IMDb page but something I suspected based on the tone of the story.
You see Re/Member, while enjoyable for what it is, does feel like it would’ve worked better as an animated feature as the tone shifts from deeply horrifying to quirky teen drama the way night shifts into day (and I do mean that literally as the horror here is like that found in A Nightmare on Elm Street and plays out when these kids fall asleep).
We follow our lead protagonist Asuka (Kanna Hashimoto) a young girl who has a good home life but who has no friends at school. She spends her days eating alone, sometimes away from the other kids in the school cafeteria and it’s on one of these days she’s sees something horrific appearing from an old well on the school grounds. Later that night while she sleeps, Asuka dreams she’s back at her school, this time accompanied by six other students who as it turns out have all been having the same recurring nightmare of a bloodied girl carrying a teddy bear (the English translation calls the Red Person) hunting them and brutally dispatching them one by one. On waking the next day Asuka comes to the realisation that she’s stuck in a time loop with the same students she saw in her dream, and they are forced to repeat the same day over and over again until they solve the mystery of the Red Person. Having no choice but to team up and figure out why this keeps happening, these seven end up forging deeper connections and friendships along the way.
See what I mean about tonal shifts? You would think I was describing two very different types of movies and therein lies the biggest problem with Re/Member. As a fan of anime, I’m no stranger to this type of story structure. One minute you’re being brutally torn in half, the next you’re happily playing and laughing with friends on the beach. It might seem strange but when its animated this type of thing can actually work, but as a live action movie it can be very jarring. I don’t care how much fun you have as friends, there’s no way you’re having nightmares as deeply traumatic as these are without it affecting your waking life.
That said, Re/Member does get points for some great gore, likeable characters that you’ll truly grow to care for and a final action sequence that’s both frustrating and fun to watch. There’s also the deeper theme of how loneliness affects everyone, even the people who seem happiest of all.
It’s not the best Japanese horror I’ve ever seen but it does offer up enough to be worthy of a sit-down. And with a post-credits sequence that promises more it might be just what J-horror fans are looking for.
Score: 5.5 out of 10
And you can check out more Asian horror below:
Sommerleigh of the House Pollonais. First of Her Name. Sushi Lover, Queen of Horror Movies, Comic Books and Binge Watching Netflix. Mother of two beautiful black cats named Vader and Kylo. I think eating Popcorn at the movies should be mandatory, PS4 makes the best games ever, and I’ll be talking about movies until the zombie apocalypse comes.
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