It Remains movie review: Mirror boy band’s Anson Lo makes acting breakthrough in supernatural horror thriller full of atmosphere and spooky imagery

Lo, of Cantopop boy band Mirror, plays Finn, a grieving waiter, who goes camping with friends on a near-deserted, fog-shrouded island. So far, so derivative
Kelvin Shum's film hits its stride, though, with a middle section of sustained spookiness and hallucinatory sequences. This is what nightmares are made of

3/5 stars

Almost two years after his first crack at being a movie leading man in the frivolous entertainment satire Showbiz Spy, Anson Lo Hon-ting of the popular Cantopop boy band Mirror acquits himself rather more convincingly in It Remains, playing a guilt-ridden boyfriend trapped in a sinister dreamscape.

The film is technically the second directing effort of Kelvin Shum Ka-yin, the Hong Kong-born, Melbourne-raised and Los Angeles-trained filmmaker whose feature debut, Deliverance, has premiered outside Hong Kong but is yet to open in cinemas in his home city.

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Both films suggest Shum is a director far more adept at creating strikingly stylised imagery than telling a coherent story that makes logical sense; he also appears to have a fondness for burying family trauma deep in his excessively fragmented narratives.

The impressionistic opening of It Remains introduces us to Finn (Lo), a busy waiter at a restaurant whose mind is repeatedly flooded with memories of his girlfriend Ava (Angela Yuen Lai-lam), whose recent death in a car accident has put the protagonist in a catatonic state.

Together with his colleagues Luke (Tommy Chu Pak-hong), Liam (Ng Siu-hin) and Cora (theatre artist Tree Kwok Chui-yi), Finn finds himself on an absurdly ill-advised camping trip to a deserted village on a remote, foggy island that has no phone reception and no ship back in another two days.

The derivative quality of this supernatural horror movie soon comes to a head when a long-haired woman clad in a white robe begins to show up. The rural village's only resident, the creepy Uncle Wah (former martial arts superstar David Chiang Da-wei), warns of a lurking menace.

And then the miraculous happens in the film's middle section. It Remains launches into a genuinely chilling stream of hallucinatory sequences as the quartet of visitors confront the darkest chapters in their respective personal pasts - a remarkably effective example of style over substance.

While these backstories are more than a little cliched, Shum transcends this by creating an atmosphere of sustained spookiness, as well as some of the most beautifully staged images and montages seen in Hong Kong horror cinema in many a long year.

Inevitably, a conventional third act that reveals Wah's tragic past and the root of evil in his village slightly undermines the mood. But there's no denying that, during the brief passages in which It Remains hits its stride, it comes close to feeling like the stuff that nightmares are made of.

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