‘Remake’ Review: Ross McElwee’s Exquisite Reflection on a Lost Son and the Filmed Life That Remains

Key Highlights

• For filmmaker Ross McElwee, his home movies were shot with as much care and purpose as the candid, personal documentaries he presented to wider audiences — but for an artist who trades in autobiography, private memories will inevitably bleed into public ones, and in his complex, self-confronting and eventually shattering new film “Remake,” the line is erased entirely.
• Related Stories 'Wicked: For Good': Paul Tazewell Upcycled Elphaba's Looks and Wove Audrey Hepburn's Style into Glinda's Designs 'Wicked' Cinematographer Alice Brooks on Shooting Emotional 'For Good' Sequence Using Torch Flames and Why the Hand-Holding Moment Tugs at Heartstrings Fourteen years have passed since McElwee’s last feature “Photographic Memory,” and they’ve been tragically consequential ones: In 2016, his son Adrian died at just 27 years of age, another victim of America’s opiate addiction crisis.
• Adrian was a lively and critical presence in “Photographic Memory,” which poignantly addressed McElwee’s growing sense of alienation from his college-age son — then an aspiring filmmaker himself, fixated on new technologies to which his father (pointedly complaining that Adrian was “in a constant state of technical overload”) remained resistant.
• Popular on Variety Resuming that subject in ways no parent could plan or wish for, McElwee now looks back on a loss that happened not suddenly but over time, wondering what his camera captured of Adrian along the way, and what that footage stands for in his absence.
• A highlight of this year’s Venice official selection that has since played major docfests including IDFA, “Remake” is as emotionally overwhelming as one might expect, but far from a one-note grief memoir.