Based on the novella “—30—” by Laird Barron, writer-director Philip Galett’s They Remain feels like an episode of Black Mirror minus the techno-terror. It follows Keith (William Jackson Harper) and Jessica (Rebecca Henderson), who–like Adam and Eve–are left alone in the woods by their mysterious employers to conduct some vague experiments.
Though the assignment seems innocuous enough, they both can’t shake the feeling that something is amiss in the woods. It’s not just unjustified paranoia. Years before, a group of cult members killed dozens of people in the woods and the longer they stay, the more it seems like there might be something evil about the terrain itself. It’s an intriguing premise, but one that the film unfortunately squanders. For all its potential, They Remain ends up feeling like a half-baked psychological thriller that says nothing new or particularly interesting about human behavior.
One of the film’s biggest problems is that it has no sense of time or place. The flashes we see of the cult recall Manson and his girls, but their clothing suggests ’90s grunge. Keith and Jessica’s pure white domicile suggests the future, but their tech doesn’t seem much more advanced than what we already have—they use walkie-talkie’s for Pete’s sake.
On one hand, Gelatt is probably trying to keep things vague. The story is self-contained and we don’t necessarily need to know all the how’s and why’s that got us here. However, it’s also difficult to pay attention to the story and the sinister mood it’s trying to establish when there are so few concrete details to latch onto.
The vagueness of the set up might not be such a problem if the characters could fill that void. Jessica is particularly disastrous. She’s supposed to be a mystery to Keith and obsessed with the cult that used to inhabit the land, but she’s also so stone-faced that it’s difficult to see her as a person instead of a plot device. Some of that is the writing, but the rest is undeniably about performance. Henderson sells the coldness and the obsession fine, but she misses the allure that, for instance, Allison Williams achieved in last year’s Get Out. There’s no real mystery to her and it undercuts the narrative’s twists and turns.
Henderson also has zero chemistry with Harper—though Henderson doesn’t deserve all the blame there. Harper plays Keith as so distrustful and, frankly, disinterested for much of the film that when the characters do inevitably sleep together, it doesn’t feel like something these characters would choose to do. It’s a necessary plot point to reach a predetermined goal that nobody bothers to justify. The same goes for Keith’s arc. Like Jessica, it’s hard to see him as anything except one-dimensional, so his slow descent into madness doesn’t feel that strange. We barely know or understand the self that slowly slips away from him. Admittedly, that may be more a failure of writing than acting.
Barron wrote the basic story, but Gelatt is responsible for expanding it and he’s done a pretty poor job. Aside from the character issues and the lack of a coherent setting, the whole film feels narratively thin. Some of it is an editing issue. The story is non-linear and deliberately repetitive, so it can be hard to understand how much time has passed.
The real issue, though, is that not much really happens at all. Keith and Jessica have the same conversations over and over until they eventually have sex. A cocky helicopter pilot straight out of a comic book comes to do an exposition dump and Keith finds a German shepherd wandering in the woods. It’s meant to build a sense of paranoia and impending dread, but it feels like aimless wandering and even the brutal ending can’t make up for it.
The first line of dialogue we hear in They Remain is a whispered, “you know how this is going to end.” While that’s not true in the moment, it is prophetic. In adapting Barron’s original story, Gelatt asks the audience to suspend too much belief to buy that these two suspicious people who don’t seem to like each other would actually stick together, let alone choose to work for a company that’s clearly lying to them in the first place. Sure, it eventually delivers on all the darkness it sets up, but the journey up to that moment is such a waste of a good idea and decent actors that it’s impossible to appreciate it.
Rating: 3.5/10
