Ross McElwee has spent forty years pointing a camera at the people he loves, and Remake is the film where that practice finally turns on him. His son Adrian died from a fentanyl overdose in the bathroom of McElwee's Boston home at age 27. The footage McElwee had been collecting since Adrian's infancy — monthly check-ins, a gorgeous kid netting crayfish, a tense teenager raising his hand to block the lens — became simultaneously an archive and an indictment. Remake is what he made when he picked the camera back up. The structural move is audacious and probably necessary for the film's survival as a watchable object. McElwee had been following a Hollywood producer's attempt to adapt his 1986 documentary Sherman's March into a fictional feature — a meta-documentary about documentary adaptation. He keeps that thread alive inside Remake, letting the absurdist churn of the entertainment industry (the project cycles from comedy feature to dramatic miniseries to TV sitcom to verbatim live opera) run as dark counterpoint to the grief. Without it, he says, the film would have been too depressing. He's right. The Sherman's March material earns its place. Charleen Swansea — the voluble former English teacher who became, according to a poll of American critics, 'the greatest documentary character of all time' — appears again, now deep in dementia, with no memory of the film or of teaching McElwee English. 'Things just disappear,' she says. The echo is devastating and McElwee doesn't underline it. He doesn't need to. Swansea said in Sherman's March, 'This isn't art, this is life.' Four decades later, McElwee is finally learning what she meant. The film's sharpest question is one McElwee can't answer: did the camera hurt Adrian? He wonders whether his 2011 film Photographic Memory got Adrian wrong — painted him as resilient when he wasn't — and whether the Venice festival exposure turned his son's head at a vulnerable moment. He asks, plainly, whether he gave Adrian a false impression of his own invincibility, one that let him keep using drugs. 'It was only later — after he got into trouble and then after he died — that I began to see the film in a different light.' There's no resolution here, and McElwee doesn't fake one. Victoria Mapplebeck, whose 2024 documentary Motherboard covers similar territory — two decades of life as a working single mother alongside her son Jim — tells McElwee she watched Remake feeling 'both ashamed and moved.' Her read is precise: children sometimes grant consent to be filmed because they recognize what filming means to the parent, not because they want it for themselves. 'Fundamentally I needed to do it more than Jim did,' she says. The same charge hangs over McElwee, and he accepts it. What saves Remake from becoming an exercise in self-flagellation is Adrian himself, present in the archive. As a little kid he says, 'I just love the deep surprise of the ocean.' As a young man he tells his father to stop making small documentaries and 'just do some big blockbuster hit.' McElwee suspects that even if Adrian had lived to see Remake, he might have called it 'interesting' but complained it wasn't generating enough money. That joke — affectionate, specific, unrepeatable — is what grief actually sounds like. McElwee is 79 and says he's lost the compulsion to film. He attended family reunions and a nephew's wedding this past year and couldn't make himself pick up the camera. 'I want to take a break and let life be life without me trying to turn it into art.' Whether that break is permanent is the one question Remake wisely doesn't answer.
