Clevercell Very disappointing...

VeteranLight I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Onlinewsma Absolutely Brilliant!

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

realityinmind You know a movie is not really worth it when the top reviewer has to sell you a 10/10 by justifying it with "if you don't like really good slow creeping thriller horrors that really make you think about the plot, and instead like badly written half-scary slam-bam horrors, then you won't like this movie". Basically ANYTIME a review tells you that you won't like this movie if (insert generic comparison to good movie here) or you won't like this movie if you like movies that (insert generic comparison to horrible movie here) then you just skip over that review. THAT is not a reason to like a movie. THAT is a perfect example of paid reviews or reviews by people who are inflating the score.The good thing here is that the movie was so bad that even the score can't be inflated past a 5/10. It truly is not worth more than that. This movie does not explain any of the back story or plot, whether subtly or through exposition. The viewer is just supposed to pay attention so much that they read the minds of the writer and director. (BTW, I have seen reviews that label the writer as some sort of MASTER horror author, yet the guy hasn't sold more than 100 copies of any of his books, and none of them are rated higher than 4/5. That means that the few people who have read them still didn't think they were MASTERFUL pieces, yet now we have movie reviewers that think his books are PERFECT and that this movie is a 10/10??? Please!) How is anyone supposed to know that these two people have a romantic history with each other? It requires reading an explanation of the movie just to know that, because based on their acting and dialogue they are just two coworkers that have been assigned a job who constantly bicker back and forth with each other. The girl is always frowning, as if she has a lemon in her mouth, and speaks without any inflection. ZERO inflection. She sounds like a robot. And the guy is always staring at things as if he is protesting the concept of blinking. These people have no emotion, no character development, NO SOUL!Are these people investigating a cult? Or are they the last people on the planet investigating genocide? Oh, now she discovered some wasps... are they biologists looking to see if an unknown chemical killed off all of the life? Oh wait, there is a hole in the ground with a crazy fossil of an unknown species... maybe there is a monster? Are they being stalked by hands? Is it a poltergeist that can fiddle with the cameras? Does someone live by with a pet dog? I mean, CMON... pick a direction and stick with it!! Its as if the director tried everything he could to make his own story scary (this is the guy who wrote Europa Report --- good movie!). Maybe he wrote this dribble years before.At least the last 10 minutes or so of the movie is decent. It ends on a good note, but if you spend just a few seconds thinking about it you will realize that it is the type of ending that it just written into a story because there is nowhere else to go with it. It makes no sense and there is no explanation for anything. So many questions left unanswered, but not deeply profound questions.... just annoying distractions that leave you saying "huh? this sucks".But the bottom line here is... DO NOT TRUST ANYONE WHO GAVE THIS A 7/10, 8/10, 9/10, or 10/10...... because what they are saying is that they think this movie equates with some of the BEST MOVIES EVER MADE. (Impossible). Even (biased) Rotten Tomatoes tried to make this movie stand out with their 60% positive reviews, but you will notice that the audience reviews gave it a score that more closely resembles the score on IMDB --- 30%. And the IMDB score has to wrestle with all of these fake 8/10, 9/10, and 10/10 ratings. Imagine what this movie would be rated if you got rid of all of the fake paid reviews???? Probably a 2/10 or 3/10. I give it 3/10 because this movie sucks. Alternate recommendation: HALLOWEEN 3: THE ONE WITHOUT MICHAEL MYERS

prince_vlad I've seen a lot of movies in my life, and I mean it, A LOT, but nothing like this. It lets you wonder where did you encounter such feelings, such movie... Both actors, never seen them before, play actual very well, especially the woman character. The tension rises but soon you discover that it happens but not in the way you would expect and that gives you a strange feeling that soemthing is not right with this movie, with what you already seen. And as just in the best movies, it keep you guessing and you mind constructs things on the fly based of your movie experience, but nothing seem to prepare you for the final. A very good indie movie I'd say.

s3276169 Ponderous, pretentious and emotionally stunted, those are my lasting impressions of They Remain. Whilst the back story holds together well enough, any promise this film might have had is wasted. This is a ponderously slow burn thriller that's laboriously wanders from vague pretentious symbolic abstraction to abstraction, offering the viewer a visual feast but a contextual famine. The result is an aimless affair where the key characters are so caught up in the visual symbolism and inexplicable, moody, mono-tonal narrative, that any emotional range, that might have helped build the tension this thriller desperately needs, is lost. In conclusion, a dissatisfying film, that wants to go somewhere but forgot to ask for directions. 4/10 from me.

donkeycity Compelling performances, often-gorgeous cinematography, and a persistent sense of unease and alien eroticism, make for a hypnotic Horror film that opens itself up for you get lost in its rich textures and existential dread. Think 'Picnic at Hanging Rock,' but with a touch more paganism. It's pretty great.They Remain is, to my knowledge, the first cinematic adaptation of a Laird Barron story (this one being rooted in -30- from the Occultation short story collection), and it does a wonderful job of evoking the unsettling world-behind-the-world that is the persistent undercurrent of Barron's work. Readers of story might note that the setting has moved from a California desert to a chilly forest - a move I think really works to the film's advantage, letting the internal confusion of the characters manifest externally, and - importantly - providing an environment that feels ancient and alive, brimming with cycles of life and death, decomposition and rebirth. For me, at least, it gives it much more of a 'folk horror' atmosphere that I really connected with.Separating this film from other works adjacent to this stripe of dream-inflected natural Horror is the strong work by the two lead actors. They largely carry, and solidify, the narrative by skirting between both alienation and dependence, keeping the audience enthralled in the acrimony bubbling under the surface within the tight confines of the field research lab, as the ebb and flow of needing a home to come back to conflicts with the compulsion to taste the reckless freedom of just being lost in nature, and the price that is paid for both.It's a really excellent film that, for the right audience at least, is going to be a deeply compelling and unsettling experience.