As we have become accustomed to the American horror movie formula (since its main rivals, the British, Italian, Mexican and Japanese film industries have almost abandoned the genre), it becomes obvious, when we are confronted by a different horror movie, that today most of this genre productions look like long advertising spots, with commercial aesthetics and style, that promote, I don't know, ketchup, green sauces, make-ups, visual effects software, whatever but true horror.
While watching this Icelandic film, I remembered what happened to a similar movie, «I Am the Beautiful Thing That Lives in the House", a Canadian production that was misunderstood, maligned and unjustly underrated. Both works address a favorite conflict in horror motion pictures, stories and myths: that of the spirits that seek peace, after violent deaths or when their bodies have not been found. In «Pretty Thing», a nurse is haunted by the specter of a beautiful young woman who was killed by her groom. In «I Remember You», we find two children who were mistreated and mocked by their peers and suddenly were missing. These stories frequently reflect on the sense of responsibility or guilt felt by those who remain alive when someone close dies, in whose deaths they were somehow involved. Their responsibility or guilt take the form of ghosts that generally only they can see and "free" them from the attachment to this plane of existence.
Based on a novel by Yrsa Sigurdardottir (Reykjavik, 1963), an Icelandic author specializing in two genres perhaps antagonistic (crime novels and children's books ...), «I Remember You» involves complex characters and biographies full of ungrateful incidents, from the psychiatrist who has never been able to locate the body of his missing son, to the man and two women trying to open a hostel on an abandoned island, without knowing that they are in the house with a horrific past. One of the missing children is somehow connected to the strange mutilations and deaths of elders who seem to be part of a sect and, above all, with the psychiatrist's son.
The evolution of the drama is always interesting, the performances and the cinematography of Jakob Ingimundarson are all good, and there is no lack of tension and a couple of scares, but here we do not find the primary, ancestral and classic horror so dear to the British Hammer films, to the Italian horror master Mario Bava or to the Mexican studios Churubusco Azteca, but a more adult and contemporary approach to horror. «I Remember You» has enough merits to enjoy an evening of good genre cinema in its of 21st century version. See it.
