Over the course of his career, Eichiro Hasumi has been making quite a name for himself directing entertaining genre features, even though the majority of them is somewhat forgettable. Apart from “Assassination Classroom: Graduation” he is perhaps best known for this entries into the “Resident Evil”-franchise, “Infinite Darkness” and the upcoming “Death Island”, which cemented the reputation of the animated entries of the franchise being in many ways superior to the lukewarm features by the likes of Paul W.S. Anderson. In between these last two projects, he directed “re:member” (also known as “Re/Member”), which was released on Netflix, and which is his take on the horror genre, blending ideas from J-horror, the slasher genre and time travel movies.
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The story centres around six high-school students, with Asuka (Kanna Hashimoto) essentially being the main protagonist. One day, which begins seemingly normal, becomes increasingly weirder as time goes by, with one of her classmates, Shota (Kotaro Daigo) being framed as a thief, and Rie (Mayu Yokota) meeting her secret boyfriend, a former student at their school who is now working as a bartender. Besides Asuka facing the other students avoiding her and treating her as an outsider, she also has a vision of a girl outside the school followed by a strange call once she is back home.
However, in her dreams she is back at school, along with Shota, Rie, Takahiro (Gordon Maeda), Atsushi (Fuju Kamio) and Rumiko (Maika Yamamoto). They are in the school's chapel along with an empty coffin and, to their horror, they are being chased by a woman carrying a puppet and covered in what appears to be blood. As they are killed off one by one in gruesome fashion, they wake up in their beds again to experience the previous day once again. Once they meet in school again they hear about the legend of the “Body Search”, in which a group of chosen students has to find the missing body parts and put them inside the coffin, before the “Red Person” catches them. However, finding the parts is not as easy as it seems and while doing so they uncover the truth behind the “Red Person”.
Even though “re:member” tries its best to be the kind of genre mix which has been introduced in the beginning, the feature fails to be any of these. There is a lot of appeal to blending horror and time travel, as multiple genre entries have shown over the last years, but in this case experiencing the same order of events and the same chase again and again makes you feel like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day”: increasingly bored and annoyed. Harumi Doki's script does not have a lot of variety to it, which is also the case for Hasumi's direction, because it simply does not know where it wants to go, resulting in a movie which feels way too long. There is no tension, no memorable scares and the narration is predictable.
Sadly, much of the points mentioned in the paragraph before can also be applied to the characters. The teenage heroes, who we are supposed to empathize with, come from the typical gallery of genre stereotypes, ranging from the outsider, the nerd, the beauty queen and the love interest. There is nothing special about these characters and the performers also fail to make them memorable, even though, given the material they have to work with, it is debatable whether this is their fault. You will find yourself not caring about any of them or their fate, and in the end, you might even catch yourself wishing the “Red Person” would just get on with it and find them all, so you can watch something else instead.
While its premise sounds interesting, “re:member” fails to convince as a genre entry and, despite its title, is not memorable at all.
