Re/Member, the review: on Netflix the j-horror from the homonymous manga

The review of Re/Member, live action of the horror manga where a group of students is grappling with a restless spirit, forced to relive the same day until they put an end to the curse.

A little girl is killed in mysterious circumstances inside a school complex. Some time later, six students begin to fall victim to a disturbing phenomenon: among them is Asuka Morisaki, the first to witness the apparition of the spirit of the little victim, now looking for someone to find her body and finally grant him the longed for peace.

As we tell you in the review of Re/MemberAt the stroke of midnight, Asuka and her companions find themselves within the walls of the institute, where they are hunted by the ghost of the Red Person and mercilessly killed, only to wake up the next day in their beds. But time has stopped and the six “chosen ones” continually relive the same twenty-four hours; as they will soon discover, the only way to get out of the curse and from that loop in which they find themselves stuck is to find all the missing pieces of the corpse and put it back together inside a coffin. The search will not be easy at all and in the meantime a relationship of deep friendship will be created between the unfortunate protagonists.

The School of Horrors

And j-horror full-blown, with the school setting often used by the relative sub-strand in a more or less coherent way. Re/Member is taken from the namesake manga shōnen, published in Italy by Edizioni BD, written by Welzard and drawn by Katsutoshi Murase and which achieved some success, so as to also generate a sequel and a spin-off as well as a transposition into animated form. This live-action follows with some freedom, at least on a narrative level, what is told in the pages of the original work, and must adapt to a limited length – one hundred minutes – which prevents us from expanding the psychologies of the various characters in the game, who remain as well as archetypes in the making without ever reaching full awareness of themselves, also weakening the hypothetical emotional impact towards them.

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remember me

Life among the desks, with the bullying as a malus in the real world and loneliness as a practice that unites the six main characters – chosen precisely because of this status – is thus barely sketched and even the brief background romantic excursus is not fully explored, or rather developed in a superficial way. Re/Member had several potentials in this regard, most of which remained untapped in favor of a fast and frenetic pace that focuses on gender dynamics. Genre dynamics unleashed in the night sequences, with healthy gender violence and vague excesses splatter to peep out in the brutal showdown between the boys and the restless spirit, yet another yurei with an unnatural and monstrous appearance behind which a frightened soul is hiding, who died in horrible and painful circumstances, now only looking for a proper burial .

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I’m starting over from the dead

Re/Member then brings up the issue of time loop, more akin to science fiction cinema, with the days that continue to repeat each other until the curse is broken: this is an opportunity to gradually change the events in that reality which by now seems increasingly distant to the figures involved, in eternal waiting for that night where to finally try to get out of that seemingly interminable nightmare. One hundred minutes of vision where everything proceeds in a relatively predictable way, at least until that twist following the end credits which tinges the outcome of the story with unexpected bitterness, opening the doors to a hypothetical continuation and casting new shadows on what has just assisted.