Remake

Remake is Ross McElwee’s latest documentary which won the Golden Globe Impact Prize for Documentary at the Venice Film Festival last year. It reflects on McElwee’s career and the loss of his son, Adrian, interweaving themes of grief and the relationship between art and life.

The documentary, predominantly set in Boston, follows McElwee as he explores footage of his family and friends across his life. McElwee’s work is often deeply personal and autobiographical and this can be seen in Remake with footage of weddings, difficult conversations and moments of a family fracturing. Through the handheld camera McElwee often uses, it creates the effect for the viewer that we are there with him during these intimate and, at times, tragic moments in his life.

The heart of the film is clearly the relationship between McElwee and his son, Adrian. The film opens with footage of Adrian fishing as a young boy and these shots from childhood are heartwarming, showing Adrian as a quick-witted, happy child. These shots are particularly powerful when mirrored with Adrian’s struggles with bipolar and substance abuse issues as he reaches his twenties.

The frequent cuts between Adrian’s childhood and adulthood highlight the fracturing image that McElwee has of his son. Does Adrian simply become a character through this footage and how can one person truly know another? In Remake, McElwee is clearly battling with these questions and feels that he knows less about his son the older he grows.

Adrian’s death holds a constant shadow over this documentary. As McElwee reflects on his previous films, like In Paraguay and Sherman’s March, viewers will fall into a false sense of security that perhaps there isn’t this tragic event hanging over the film but these moments of respite don’t last long. Indeed, the grief of losing a child transforms his previous work, especially Photographic Memory, which almost serves as a warning to what will happen.

It's Adrian’s substance abuse issues that end up taking his life in what feels like a tragically familiar story: a young man overdosing on fentanyl and introduced to opioids through Oxycontin. The anger that McElwee has in the aftermath of this is palpable. Whether it be anger towards the dealers that supplied Adrian with the fentanyl, or anger at himself for not being able to stop this outcome. In some ways, Remake can be compared with A Beautiful Boy but McElwee is able to prevent the surface level conversation of that film by analysing his own art through the lens of this grief.

Charleen Swansea seems to capture the core of what McElwee is discussing in footage taken from Sherman’s March where Swansea says, ‘this is not art, this is life.’ It is this very idea that McElwee wrestles with throughout the film as he tries to see where that separation between his art and his life lies.

Indeed, it’s something that Adrian also explores with his own filmmaking being used in the film too. Before he passed, Adrian appeared to be making a film documenting his struggles with addiction and his bipolar. It’s these moments, accompanied by McElwee’s narration, that are hauntingly tragic.

Perhaps the most profound meditation on grief and the relationship between art and life in this film can be seen towards the end. McElwee narrates about how he continues to watch back Adrian’s footage and the footage he shot of Adrian but wonders whether he is becoming a fictional character to him that is shaped by these pieces of footage. There is a simple line here that is one of the most powerful in the entirety of the film where McElwee says, ‘I keep watching’.

Remake will be released in UK and Irish cinemas from 25 September 2026.