Asuka Morisaki gets up for an average day at high school where she feels invisible and ignored by her classmates. That night she and five others are drawn to the school’s chapel where they find an empty coffin before they are pursued through the school and killed by a ghostly child they call The Red Terror. They then wake in the morning to repeat the same school day over where those who were killed are alive once again, before night falls and they are pursued through the school by The Red Terror again. In the morning, the same scenario repeats itself. They realise that they have been summoned to search the school to find and reunite the body parts of a young girl that was killed thirty years ago.
I enjoyed Groundhog Day (1993) when it first came out. One of the things that has surprised me is just how much its theme of people being stuck in a timeloop has caught on and been repeatedly used by filmmakers. This is in contrast to literary time travel fiction where the timeloop is a relatively minor theme. Other films to do so include the likes of Retroactive (1997), Run Lola Run (1998), Naken (2000), Repeaters (2010), Source Code (2011), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), ARQ (2016), Before I Fall (2017), Happy Death Day (2017), Naked (2017), Boss Level (2020), Palm Springs (2020) and The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (2021), even two entire tv series with Day Break (2006-7) and Russian Doll (2019- ).. I have a more detailed listing of these films here at Timeloop Films.
Japanese director Eiichiro Hasumi has a preference for films that are usually adapted from manga or other source works. He had previously made the popular manga-adapted Assassination Classroom (2015) and its sequel Assassination Classroom: Graduation (2016), as well as the manga-adapted likes of the Umizaru films about a Japanese coast guard, the manga adapted SF film Wild 7 (2011), the horror film Mozu the Movie (2015) based on a tv series and the anime Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness (2021). Re/Member is adapted from a manga that appeared in Weekly Shonen Jump between 2014 and 2017. It had previously been adapted as an anime tv series Re/Member (2017) that ran for ten episodes.
Japanese teenagers Kanna Hashimoto, Gordon Maeda and Maika Yamamoto face horrors in a timeloop
It is quite an oddity watching Re/Member. It starts out as a standard seeming Japanese high school drama, charting the standard tropes and characters – the lonely girl with the crush on the cute boy, the nerd, the bitchy girl and so on (all that is missing are the school bullies). Then comes the sudden jump into gore-drenched horror as we see the characters being pursued through the school and slaughtered. This is followed by a disorienting jump from nightmare back to innocent school drama again as the scenario repeats itself.
If nothing else, it is the first occasion where the Groundhog Day timeloop theme has been made into a full horror film. Happy Death Day conducted an unadventurous mix of Groundhog Day and slasher film but this pushes the horror element much further with characters being slaughtered and pursued through the school by a giant lumpen doll that belongs well in nightmare fuel territory.
The story comes together quite well towards the end. The characters undergo a gruelling battle to trap the giant creature, during which many are killed. The almost romantic elements of the Japanese school fantasy are allowed to play out with eventually poignant effect and everything comes together quite nicely at the ending.
