Review | It Remains movie review: Mirror boy band’s Anson Lo makes acting breakthrough in supernatural horror thriller full of atmosphere and spooky imagery
- Lo, of Cantopop boy band Mirror, plays Finn, a grieving waiter, who goes camping with friends on a near-deserted, fog-shrouded island. So far, so derivative
- Kelvin Shum’s film hits its stride, though, with a middle section of sustained spookiness and hallucinatory sequences. This is what nightmares are made of
3/5 stars
The film is technically the second directing effort of Kelvin Shum Ka-yin, the Hong Kong-born, Melbourne-raised and Los Angeles-trained filmmaker whose feature debut, Deliverance, has premiered outside Hong Kong but is yet to open in cinemas in his home city.
Both films suggest Shum is a director far more adept at creating strikingly stylised imagery than telling a coherent story that makes logical sense; he also appears to have a fondness for burying family trauma deep in his excessively fragmented narratives.
The impressionistic opening of It Remains introduces us to Finn (Lo), a busy waiter at a restaurant whose mind is repeatedly flooded with memories of his girlfriend Ava (Angela Yuen Lai-lam), whose recent death in a car accident has put the protagonist in a catatonic state.
Together with his colleagues Luke (Tommy Chu Pak-hong), Liam (Ng Siu-hin) and Cora (theatre artist Tree Kwok Chui-yi), Finn finds himself on an absurdly ill-advised camping trip to a deserted village on a remote, foggy island that has no phone reception and no ship back in another two days.