‘Remake’ review: Ross McElwee’s extraordinary, profound documentary looks back at a life behind the camera

Dir. Ross McElwee. US. 2025. 114mins

US documentarist Ross McElwee tells us that he has at all times filmed his household life “to make sense of the world”. However in his extraordinary new work, he strives to make sense of his personal life, his household and his whole film-making profession, with fearless and certainly distressing candour. In Remake, McElwee revisits the footage of a lifetime – each from his house life and his earlier movies – as he makes an attempt to return to phrases with the dying of his grownup son Adrian.

A richly rewarding expertise

A fancy, layered contemplation of grief, reminiscence, household ties and the which means of film-making as a profoundly private exercise, Remake is a richly rewarding expertise – emotionally, narratively and philosophically. Premiered out of competitors in Venice, the place it gained the Golden Globes Influence Prize for documentary, it now performs in Stockholm and IDFA, and calls out to be extra extensively seen in addition to passionately mentioned.

There are two strands to Remake, one in all them intermittently comedian. It includes a proposal McElwee receives to show his 1986 movie Sherman’s March – his breakthrough as a first-person documentarist – right into a Hollywood fiction function. This leads McElwee to replay some key sequences from that movie, and to revisit a few of its contributors – together with his outdated good friend, schoolteacher Charleen Swansea, an exuberantly no-bullshit lady seen in 1986 upbraiding McElwee for missing ardour, telling him to show off his digicam: “This isn’t artwork, that is life!” Years later, Swansea, now with dementia, tells McElwee that she will be able to’t bear in mind showing in his movie, nor her personal instructing profession.

The late Swansea is without doubt one of the two dedicatees of Remake, the opposite being Adrian McElwee, who died aged 27 seven years earlier than Remake’s voice-over narrative begins. Filmed all through his life, from his very earliest years, Adrian was a continuing presence and typically collaborator in his father’s work. Remake collates moments from his whole life, however it’s laborious to reconcile the furiously imaginative, joyously artistic pre-teen Adrian with the depressed, troubled younger man of his later years. The movie’s final 40 minutes current a sober, matter-of-fact account of his melancholy, wrestle with heroin habit and eventually, deadly relapse simply when his life appeared on the upturn.

Modifying with long-term Werner Herzog collaborator Joe Bini, McElwee weaves Adrian’s story right into a characteristically digressive construction. The movie options different members of McElwee’s household – adopted daughter Maria, former spouse Marilyn Levine – and reveals the director going through resistance from them once they finally weary of his digicam. Publish-divorce, McElwee will get along with fellow film-maker Hyun Kung Kim; she is completely happy to be filmed, so long as he doesn’t present her face.

Clips from earlier McElwee movies – together with his final two, In Paraguay (2008) and Photographic Reminiscence (2011) – are repurposed right here, together with ample footage shot by Adrian himself throughout his enthusiastic however unfocused makes an attempt to begin his personal profession as a film-maker and multimedia creator. Adrian is seen attending festivals together with his father, notably taking part in a Venice press convention – however McElwee Sr finally ends up questioning whether or not Adrian’s lifelong publicity to the digicam, and finally to the competition limelight, has contributed to his difficulties.

Certainly, one of the vital painful and incisive points of Remake is the way in which through which McElwee is pressured to ask himself whether or not his intensely dedicated mission of a long time has in reality been damaging to himself and people round him – or certainly futile. And the movie inevitably raises the query of whether or not diary-style film-making, inevitably involving others, could be seen not solely as trustworthy however doubtlessly as exploitative, even abusive.

McElwee followers have lengthy treasured each his rambling associative model and the characteristically lugubrious monotone of his voice-over model – which right here registers as profoundly sorrowful, though deadpan humour does emerge. And love resonates all through – for Adrian and for the individuals McElwee has recognized all through his life. Right here, Charleen Swansea is foremost amongst them. Her personal late-life situation chimes with the theme of cinema’s capability to protect reminiscence, whereas her warning to McElwee a long time in the past about life and artwork opens up a theme that resonates powerfully by Remake: the query of whether or not a life lived with a digicam continually in hand dangers distorting, even damaging that life – or whether or not it might aspire to really reveal it in all its contradictions.