Remnants (2013)

directed by Brian Coppola

USA

67 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I really, really love these tiny, low- to no-budget found-footage horror movies that one can usually find on youtube for free. There's always an authenticity and a lack of pretentiousness about them. Remnants is interesting because instead of the typical "this footage was recovered from blah blah blah, the people on the tapes have never been found" title card, it just says that the film was created in 2012 "for fun". This means it has no allusions to being fictional, and so instead it feels like a project being presented to us honestly, with transparency. I think that's a very under-explored way to make a film, and even though it basically shoots down any real sense of immersion for me, I would love to see more filmmakers present their work in that way.

So the movie takes place largely within a trailer home where a man and woman live with their corgi, and after stumbling into an abandoned cemetery in the woods while shooting B-roll for an unrelated film project, the man brings home some malevolent spirit that attaches itself to the trailer. Or maybe the spirit was already there, it is not terribly clear. The two deal with the haunting in what I feel was a very realistic way, brushing off everything that happens in the beginning as stuff they need to call their landlord about. At one point the man is walking around outside and just kind of nonchalantly goes "...somethin grab my foot?" and moves on. They disregard the strangeness that is very apparent to us outside viewers, and I feel like that's far more accurate to what most of us would be like if we dealt with a very minor haunting in real life than the kind of film where at the slightest suggestion of ghosts everybody goes running. We're all used to dealing with things that exist strictly in material reality, and if they didn't already believe, it would take a lot for a person to be 100% convinced what they're seeing is paranormal.

The haunting doesn't stay minor for very long, though. The first moment where it goes from "normal old trailer noises" to "something direly wrong" is when one of the couple turns his back for literally a second and the cushions on their sofa are suddenly stacked up on the floor. This feels, in its context, very different again from most found-footage movies. I think the reason why the slow reveal of the haunting feels so unique here is because of how incredibly normal everything else is. Even that first moment of confirmed ghost activity would be barely anything to write home about in any other movie, but here, for these people, because they're living their happy normal life in their happy normal trailer, it's a jaw-dropper.

I was curious about whether or not this movie would show any actual ghosts on tape, apart from knocking sounds and growling and whatnot, because with the obviously very small budget, a physical ghost could make or break a movie like this depending on how it looks. And I was surprised when they actually went in a really interesting direction with how they depicted the spirit-demon-whatever. It looks GOOD, they don't show it too much and when they do it matches perfectly with the low quality of the video so that it doesn't look out-of-place at all. And it's completely not what you're expecting but it embodies malevolence really well.

The nitpicks I had about this movie could probably be counted on one hand, total, but the biggest issue I had was the presence of background music. A lot of found-footage movies add subtle ambient music to their scariest scenes and it virtually never works well. It's a little different here, since we're presented the film from the start as a work of fiction, but it's still jarring and felt unnecessary. I also just didn't like the ending because I had gotten fond of the couple and I didn't want anything really bad to happen to them- although, again, having them not be impervious to bodily harm made things more realistic. It bothered me to not know what happened to the dog, but I guess her running away from the trailer kind of implied that she escaped with her life. That dog was a fantastic actor, by the way- I was scratching my head trying to figure out how they got her to do some of the stuff she did without obviously giving her commands.