Remake
Director – Ross McElwee – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 114m
***
Having filmed his son Adrian since early childhood, the filmmaker uses that footage to come to terms with Adrian’s death – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 25th
Documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee used to film his son Adrian for a few minutes about once a month. On a visit to Paraguay, he shot footage of the family, which always included his future adopted daughter. He screened the film about Paraguay at the Venice Film Festival, then put off screenings for quite a while. For a time, he went through a ‘golden age’ of filming, but as Adrian entered his late teens, the family seemed to get fed up with his filmmaking.
Then, Hollywood producer Steve Carr contacted him about a narrative remake of his documentary Sherman’s March (1985), which was the film in which Ross started to film and incorporate elements of his own life. Ross goes to consult his professional advisers – his brother and sister. He goes to Los Angeles to talk with Steve Carr, who had directed a series of commercially successful comedies. He signs a deal which will also allow him to make a documentary about the remake. At this point, Adrian was becoming more and more interested in ‘real movies’.
Ross’ longtime friend Charlene thinks he should try and get out of the contract, but Ross insists he’s like to see someone turn it into a successful feature film. She talks about memory as she gets older, how sometimes things “just pop up”. She refers to it as “like a beehive”
For Ross, Adrian is gone. And yet, he’s not gone. He lives on in all these filmed moments. Numerous bits of footage show him as a young man – skateboarding whilst being watched by a nine year old girl. Moving around a car park.
The remake turns from a feature film into a TV miniseries with Steve directing the pilot. Ross decides that while all this is going on, he needs to get himself back into the world of the documentary, and visit some of the people he filmed in Sherman’s March.
He visits his mother’s grave, to find it gone. He finds it under a couple of inches of turf, and brings it back into the real world.
He visits Winnie Wood, who appears milking a cow in Sherman’s. Watching it, she can recall the sensations of milking. This contrasts with Charlene , preserved telling him his life needs more passion, but who can’t even remember appearing in the film.
Years later, Adrian, at college in Vermont, ended up in the hospital. He had a long history of alcohol and drug abuse and is diagnosed as bipolar.
Ross gets a notification that his Photographic Memory project, to be shot in France, has been approved. The film is Ross retracing his steps as a young man trying to figure out what he’s going to do with his life. While this is going on, his son is similarly trying to figure out what he is doing with his own life. They talk over a video link.
Father and son attend the Venice Film Festival for the premier, both appearing at a press conference. Other film festivals follow. Adrian brings along his camera, and makes written notes. We are treated to clips of Adrian’s music videos made as he appeared at film festivals. Ross feels guilty about involving his son in all these things. Ross kept the alcohol, drugs and psychiatric problems out of the film. Ross feels his son may have embraced this sanitised version of Adrian.
The film moves into a section covering Adrian’s final year. Ross finds love again, with Korean filmmaker Hyun Kyung Kim who won’t let him film her face. They still film each other getting married.
Meanwhile, Adrian, who’s been in Colorado for two years, is shooting a documentary about himself and his friends. The footage becomes more and more about Adrian’s drug use and his addictions. “I know you think this is probably bullshit, but I’m still here… Ironic words indeed considering that following rehab, he dies in Ross’s bathroom the day before Christmas.
Remake is such a strange film. It’s difficult to get a handle on it. McElwee has clearly found a way of making films that works for him, that’s intensely, personal, which may appeal to some viewers far more than to others. Human beings are such odd creatures. Never more so than If one decides to film an aspect of one’s family growing up. On some level, McElwee was making a home movie, yet because of his professional filmmaker status, he was doing something rather more than that.
He admits that when he started filming his son, he didn’t really know what he was doing or why. Perhaps that’s perfectly reasonable. Or perhaps it’s a tad obsessive.
I don’t warm to Remake in the way that I warmed to D is for Distance (Chris Petit, Emma Mathews, 2025) about a father and mother doing everything they possibly can to deal with their son’s peculiar medical condition and his medical requirements to enable him to live a normal life.
McElwee, like many filmmakers, clearly likes to put his films together in the editing process. Occasionally, this enables him to come up with cinematic gold, such as when moving images of his son suddenly burst into the overall narrative in that strange way that memories will just interrupt your life in the grieving process over a long period of time.
There is even a little animation in the form of a flick book Adrian made about a squid, an animal with which he was obsessed when he was young.
Yet at other times it’s as if McElwee is at once trying to tell the story of his son and at the same time trying to tell his own story of what was happening to him. The piece rambles all over the place, and at times will try the patience of some.
Remake is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 25th, as also is Sherman’s March.
Trailer: