“A complex leap into the bottomless sorrow of a reality far too many people have to face.”

There is a photograph by Philip Montgomery entitled ‘Faces of an Epidemic’ which depicts an older couple standing outside their Midwestern home, weeping in horror as the body of their son is taken away after having overdosed on opiates. It is a moment of incomprehensible horror caught on camera, and one of the countless instances where a life has been lost to an ongoing drug epidemic that is robbing so many people of their loved ones and livelihoods. The number of lives lost to addiction is too high to even consider counting, but it’s clearly bordering on the millions by this point – and one person who knows this all too well is Ross McElwee, whose own son died after overdosing on fentanyl in 2016, after a long and harrowing battle with addiction. Adrian is the subject of his father’s most recent film Remake, which is by far the most challenging work in the esteemed documentarian’s career. It directly addresses the last twenty years in his life, recording his own personal journey with his craft, as well as the slow decline of his domestic life, all of which revolves around the changing relationship with the son he adored and who was simply lost too soon as a result of becoming the victim of a system that did not protect the most vulnerable individuals in society. It’s a hauntingly beautiful work that contains emotions that no one should ever have to even comprehend, told from the perspective of a director whose honesty and integrity completely redefine how we view the art of exploring the past.

Anyone familiar with McElwee’s work will generally have a good idea of what to expect from Remake in terms of structure and content. Like his previous films, it is a series of scenes shot over a number of years, capturing the daily life of the director. It features family and friends, takes place in locations ranging from the red carpet of the Venice Film Festival to remote family holidays in South America, capturing moments as intimate as a fishing trip with his son or a quiet conversation with his wife. Yet, like all of his work, there is an underlying narrative thread that McElwee uses to guide him – and in this case, it’s the unfathomable loss of his son, the film serving as a tribute to Adrian and capturing the changing relationship between father and son over time. These moments are contrasted with other important developments in McElwee’s life, the film being as much a document on his domestic life as it is an examination of his professional pursuits. There are many moments in which we see McElwee commenting on the challenges of getting older, as well as fascinating insights into his art, which we see through the ongoing discussion around a potential remake of his masterpiece Sherman’s March. This film serves as the framing device through which the director can anchor the conversations that have taken place over the years in which this film was in development.

McElwee’s style is based around the act of deconstructing life by capturing every possible moment. He is the first to admit that his camera is never too far out of reach – the simple act of recording is not only satisfying to him as an artist, but an essential component of his daily routine. No one has been able to find more beauty and poetry in the banality of everyday events, particularly since his entire career has been built around experimental documentaries pieced together from footage recorded during his daily life. This is the case with Remake, which is a collage of the nearly thirty years he spent raising his son, who is the central subject of the film, and whose death we are informed about in the haunting first scene, his impending demise lingering as an uncomfortable reality throughout the film. The brilliance of this film, or rather the reason it makes such an enormous impact, comes in how McElwee curates the footage, many scenes mirroring each other, despite being set decades apart. The thousands of hours of footage that McElwee had recorded over the past thirty years are elegantly assembled into a single two-hour existential odyssey in which the director addresses some unbearably challenging subjects, and even if we remove the emotional aspect (which seems almost impossible considering the nature of the film), Remake is still a staggering achievement. It not only shows the director’s ability to capture the smallest and most nuanced moments of life, but to edit them in such a way that they develop even more meaning in the process.

Describing Remake in coherent terms or associating it with any particular category or genre is nearly impossible, since to suggest one label is to dismiss another. Is it a eulogy from someone who finds more solace in images than he does words? A tribute to a life lost too soon by a director who responds to tragedy by capturing the world that surrounds him at a given moment? Perhaps it’s most appropriate to just look at Remake as a father telling the story of his son, whom he loved more than anything else, and whose death changed something within him, to the point where his very motivation to be an artist was decisively extinguished. The film begins with the words “I used to be a filmmaker”, and considering anyone who is even vaguely familiar with McElwee’s work knows that few individuals have been more committed to the craft than he, speaking in the past tense is an immediate cause for concern. It’s the first film McElwee has made in nearly fifteen years, and the finality in many of his statements throughout the film implies that this could be his last. This would not be a surprising decision, considering the personal nature of the narrative and how painful it must have been to make this film – and it’s astonishing that he even managed to find the motivation to create such a deeply personal visual essay with its stark honesty and willingness to directly address the inconceivable challenges that he has been enduring since losing his son almost a decade ago. Harrowing and poetic in equal measure, Remake is difficult to describe as anything other than a complex leap into the bottomless sorrow of a reality far too many people have to face.