What Remains (Dir/Co Scr: Ran Huang) English 2 hours 7 minutes
How does trauma affect our ability to judge evidences that is inconclusive?
Offscreen events have meant that I have a backlog of reviews to catch up on, so I’ll start with the most recent.
“What Remains” is billed as a Scandi Noir thriller. But, that is to miscategorise what we have here. There’s not a cable knit jumper or any moody detectives running through the woods with a flashlight. British-Chinese Director Ran Huang has instead fashioned a slow, moody, murky psychological study of how a crime creates connections between people, in this case leading them to dependence on each other for a validating meaning to their lives. It’s very much about the interior life, with the solution of a crime being almost incidental.
The main 3 people are involved in the reconstruction of a series of crimes: we have the person who claims to have committed them, the psychologist treating them and the policeman who has been stumped by the initial case for 10 years.
All of them are at a dead end in their lives. Mads Lake (Gustaf Skarsgard) is the longterm inmate of a Scandinavian psychiatric hospital in the 1990’s. He is fragile, troubled, confused, under heavy medication and frightened about the prospect of his imminent controlled release. He confesses to his new Psychiatrist, Anna (Andrea Riseborough) that he may have killed a boy in the past. She is a trauma victim herself and trying to use the “Remembered Memory” technique of uncovering hidden traumatic memories in patients under the tutelage of her mentor. She is also frustrated at her inability to conceive and indulges in risky sex when her fertilisation treatment programme fails. Soren (Stellan Skarsgard) is a recovering alcoholic police officer, looked down upon by his colleagues and depressed at the loss of access to his estranged wife and daughter.
The film is loosely based on real events, those surrounding Sture Bergwall, who was identified as Sweden’s worst serial killer in the 1990’s. The evidence Mads provides is flimsy and he is as much victim as perpetrator in the eyes of Anna. He is a lost man-child, unable to tell what is a memory, what is medication or treatment induced. Anna & Soren press him for more & more details and you have the impression that their motivations are more than partly driven by their own traumatic situations. They are all victims in their own way, but their interdependence leads to damaging consequences.
Huang is not really interested in the reality of the case. We never learn how many victims there are or if any bodies are found. His interests are the psychological tensions around his 3 needy protagonists and creating an atmosphere of unending gloom. The film is filmed and lit in a murky low light. We always seem to be at the point where the sun is about to wane on a grey wet day. Night and the shadows beckon, endlessly.
The 3 leads are superbly cast and there is an added dynamic in real life father (Stellan) acting with his son (Gustaf) in a script co written by his wife and Gustaf’s mother, Megan Everett-Skarsgard.
The storytelling style is elliptical, with a couple of uses of symbolistic elements (a squid floating in the air in a forest, Soren seeking solace in fortune cookies that are blank, a lot of flickering Scandi lightbulbs) that belie Huang’ s background in Fine Arts at Goldsmith University. Once he how to better marshal those ideas, he could become a major film maker.
It’s a slow film, full of long close ups in a Bergman style and filming it in Finland probably makes it gloomier than Sweden. There is very little use of music, but Ben Frost’s ambient electronica works well in the moments it is used. However, it’s a film of silences, where the audience is almost enticed into making their own assumptions, joining the dots and making mistakes just as the characters do. Everyone is waiting for someone else to reveal something. They are all passive, only able to respond, not initiate.
So, not the most cheerful of films and it’s critical reception has been mixed. There is however, much to admire: the implication of the audience (see also how this worked in “Anatomy of a Fall”), the Scandi introspective gloom and hints of Chinese Pingshu storytelling fatalism are well delivered. It’s left to us the audience to decide on Mads guilt or innocence. Is he a real serial killer or a victim of the “False Memory Syndrome”? Are we, like Soren and Anna, guilty of projecting our desire for narrative resolution onto Mads, or are we , like his brother, just wanting the trauma to go away?
That’s why we go to the cinema: we can experience a different world, but return to our lives afterwards.