!['Remake' Review: Ross McElwee Interrogates His Life & The Documentary Form In This Devastating Family Examination [Venice]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/03105158/%E2%80%98Remake-Review-Ross-McElwees-Heartbreaking-Study-of-Movies-and-Memory-Turns-the-Camera-on-His-Own-Family-Tragedy.jpg "'Remake' Review: Ross McElwee Interrogates His Life & The Documentary Form In This Devastating Family Examination [Venice]")
An emotionally piercing documentary that probes the empty void between projects in one man’s public-facing life, “Remake” overturns every narrative stone. In equal parts video autopsy and existential interrogation, director Ross McElwee tries to corral decades of footage to get closer to an understanding of what his life (and life’s pursuits) mean within the context of not just his story, but documentary filmmaking.
READ MORE: 2025 Venice Film Festival Preview: 23 Must-See Films To Watch
McElwee made a name for himself in the 1980s and 90s as an autobiographical documentarian, creating films that synthesized his personal experiences with broader, macro topics rooted in cultural observation. His 1986 film, “Sherman’s March,” blended his exploration of uniquely southern themes and history with his failed attempts at finding love, revealing several accidental truths about both in the process. “Time Indefinite,” McElwee’s 1993 documentary about his marriage, wife’s miscarriage, best friend’s tragedy, and re-exploration of faith, solidified this style and approach to filmmaking.
With his camera and sound equipment as much a part of his daily kit as a wallet or set of house keys, McElwee produced films throughout his entire adulthood that shot footage first, then asked questions later. This allowed the filmmaker an endless stream of emotional fodder to comb through to assemble his next exploration of life’s enduring mysteries; yet when his son, Adrian McElwee, died of a fentanyl overdose in 2016, the work became something very different. “Remake” is McElwee’s attempt to again find truth and broader connections through this spontaneous film footage, but this time, he’s questioning the very nature of the format (and his place in it).
McElwee’s 2011 documentary, “Photographic Memory,” explored the chasm between father and son, who, like so many parents/children, began to grow apart in the youngster’s teenage years. In “Remake,” McElwee goes back to the footage from this movie as well as the tape Adrian himself shot during and after this period, asking difficult questions about how this might have influenced the drug and mental health spiral the young man fell into right around this time. And while the format of “Remake” follows all the other entries in McElwee’s oeuvre in this way, the disintegration of his marriage in the years after 2011 and the death of his son force the documentarian to ask difficult questions that weren’t necessarily demanded of the previous offerings.
“I now worry that maybe filming my son, and then letting him travel with me to film screenings, somehow contributed to his destabilization, maybe gave him a distorted sense of reality…I now think it was this fundamentally false version that Adrian embraced as the true version of himself.” Throughout his life and career, McElwee wielded the camera like some magic cipher: one that allowed him to analyze and unpack the tangible yet invisible truths around him. “Remake” explores this approach from clips of his earlier films and other home footage, but the questions are much more difficult (as are the answers).
Did a lifetime of introspective documentary filmmaking destroy a marriage, irreparably damage a child, and ruin one man’s best attempt at happiness? In this newest effort, McElwee weaves in footage of his son’s descent into addiction, a failed Hollywood adaptation of “Sherman’s March,” and even a health scare to bring the audience up to date on his life post-2011. That was the last time he had tied up years of filmed “realities” and introspection with a tidy bow, yet the world looks much different now than it did then.
McElwee goes deeper, though, and asks how the very nature of memory is impacted by the larger absence of someone immortalized on film. He takes turns speaking to the audience and directly to Adrian, and in the latter case, remarks, “You’re alive here in this footage, but you’re no longer alive in the real world…so yes, you’re gone, but you’re not gone. Not entirely.”
A person can read all these vignettes of Adrian falling deeper into a mental health/addiction crisis as a father’s struggle to let go, with McElwee pouring over the mundane interactions and conversations ad nauseum like a person lingering on a picture of a departed loved one. And while that is certainly present in “Remake,” the larger struggle involves questions of memory itself, and how a handful of images and videos of a person can ultimately overtake their recollections in one’s mind. Although McElwee sometimes loses this in the deep dive into his footage archive, shifting between talking to the audience and Adrian, the exploration is meaningful and poignant.
Too many documentaries flatter themselves as the arbiters of truth and understanding, presenting their subjects and/or topics as one might in a book report meant to summarize and explain. “Remake” succeeds where so many others fail because it refuses to tell a story and instead poses one larger question about a person’s life’s work. McElwee wants to celebrate his son and tell his story, sure, but he also yearns to interrogate his own culpability in everything that has gone wrong in a life that has used that same format to explore all that is right. Along the way, McElwee probes the very idea of memory itself, and in perhaps his crowning achievement as a documentarian, fails to come up with any definitive answers, yet somehow still moves closer to the truth than he ever had before. [A-]
Follow along with all our coverage of the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
Warren Cantrell is a film and music critic based out of Seattle, Washington. Mr. Cantrell has covered the Sundance and Seattle International Film Festivals, and provides regular dispatches for Scene-Stealers.com. Warren holds a B.A. and M.A. in History, and his hobbies include bourbon drinking, novel writing, and full-contact kickboxing.
