Today I just saw the trailer for a new movie titled Remain, as tweeted from the Regal profile. It stars Jake Gyllenhaal, as Tate, meeting a woman, Wren (Phoebe Dynevor). As stated in the post, she is unlike anyone he’d ever met before, and they fall in love. You know, the standard Valentine’s trope, as it’s being released for Valentine’s Day explicitly. So, yeah, that all made sense, and then the second half of the trailer continued—and it’s a bunch of ghostly imagery. She’s vanishing, she’s there. She’s in the dark. The lights turn on, she’s gone. Tate is absolutely baffled.
Then I find out after that that this is a M. Night Shyamalan movie. Working on it with Nicholas Sparks. Oh boy, the people that created the Sixth Sense and the Notebook working together for a movie?
But then my brain just continued working. And as a writer, this is how I think it could be, maybe. After a couple of expositional dead ends I came up with what I think would be the great way this movie goes.
Now, I do not think I’m a superior writer to either of those two. I am just who I am, and this is what I do when I see a trailer that leaves me with a lot of questions. I answer them myself. And if this is how that movie actually explains itself, I will be jazzed. But I can also be disappointed. Or I will be completely embarrassed.
Tate is depressed, he lost his sister who told him all her life that she was able to sense spirits. She knew that there were so many different types. There were the type that needed a task done. There were vengeance types. There were sad types, then there was the type that just simply didn’t seem to be done living. She didn’t know how to, or try to, fix or help any of them. She just knew that they existed.
Tate completely disbelieved in everything his sister believed in. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t saddened by her passing. Especially so because he never saw her afterwards, and he kind of secretly thought that he would. But then he meets Wren. As described in the trailer, a woman unlike any he’s ever met before. To me she looks pretty conventional, sweet, pretty, funny. They get along famously.
But no, the second half of the trailer points out that he sees what might be her in the dark. He turns on the lights and she’s gone. It is a conventional ghost haunting story with a romantic twist, right? No.
In my version, he is unconsciously resurrecting her through acts of love. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Wren doesn’t even know what he’s doing. She is simply trying to be alive, but not knowing how. Somewhere along the way in this process she is getting more substantial. Other people are seeing her briefly, she can affect things more like drinking coffee, or running the dishwasher. And it suddenly occurs to him that maybe he’s doing something right. So, he keeps going, researching as he can.
The reveal at the end of the movie, she is alive. They are in love, happy ending.
