Fantasmas do Passado

It has beautiful scenery in locations seldom seen on film, but the story is too loose to develop any real tension. There's one effective jump scare, but that's it. And the confusing parallel timeline structure doesn't add anything to the drama. Best avoided.

The synopsis here on IMDb is not quite accurate. There are actually 2 stories happening here, and how they connect is revealed slowly, with perfect timing and a suspenseful buildup.

The first story concerns the town doctor, who is helping the police with an investigation of a woman who has died. His character spend the entire film teetering between trying to figure out this town's dark past and how it connects to some recent and frightening events, and trying to live with the torment of the loss of his son, who went missing some years earlier.

The other story is about a married couple (and her best friend) who are in town to convert an old, disused building into a bed & breakfast. There are some personal issues between the three, but the most interesting character by far is the wife. She's also experienced some trauma in her past, and it is she who suffers the strange events that happen in this story. None of what happens to her is ever seen by her husband or her friend, so we don't really know if it's real or imagined.

The town's current crimes, the renovation of the b&b, how the two narratives cross paths is revealed slowly, with suspense and satisfying scares, and is done exceedingly well.

The actors' performances were well done; not a stinker among them. And the landscape is perfect for such a tale. Desolate, cold, isolated...not just in miles, but in connection with the outside world (for example, difficulty in getting a cell phone signal). There are no cheap shots, no stunt scares. A beautiful soundtrack and gorgeous cinematography are icing on the cake of this thriller.

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.

The plot/story is based on Yrsa Sigurðardóttir's mystery novel, and so it has aspects of a good mystery and a ghost story. The screenwriters and the actors did a great job, and I didn't mind having to read the subtitles. Although, I did have to pay close attention throughout the whole film in order to understand the plot, which contains layers of complexity. In the end, it paid off because there are some very eerie, creepy scenes.

If you require a lot of blood and gore, then this may not be your kind of film. But if you enjoy good ghost stories with past history tied to the plot, then I definitely recommend it. "Chilly" might be a good word to describe the atmosphere of the film, not only because of the supernatural material but also because the Icelandic countryside looks quite chilly and remote.

Again, kudos go to all of the people who helped to make this film. I look forward to seeing future work from the director, Óskar Thór Axelsson.

This movie has a lot going for it. It has some truly creepy moments, very solid acting on everyone's part, moments of good scoring (despite some cliched choral passages), and a promising story line.

Unfortunately, for reasons I cannot understand, about two-thirds of the way through the script introduces a cliched, hackneyed domestic melodrama plot line which, while it does thematically connect with other aspects of the story, could have been dispensed with in favor of something less predictable and inane. I'm avoiding going into detail because I don't want to drop spoilers in case you decide to watch this movie. I myself have little patience for scripts that are inconsistent and which suffer under choices which the writer should have known were bad ones. The conclusion, while apropos of the story that precedes it, is also something we have seen time and time again in similar movies. It's frustrating to see what could have been and memorable movie become ultimately rather forgettable.

If you're hard up for a ghost story flick and you've seen everything else out there, I Remember You is probably worth a look, but it's not one that's going to be on my own re-watch list; which, for the sake of context, does include the likes of Ringu, The Ring, The Grudge (Japanese), Dark Water (Japanese), The Fog (original), The Haunting (original), The Innocents, Pulse and Retribution (both Kioshi Kurosawa), and the number of others that I watch repeatedly because they avoid most of the mistakes made by I Remember You.