Re/Member: The Last Night review
A sequel that solves some of its predecessor’s problems while creating some new ones.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Re/Member: The Last Night
Directed by Eiichirô Hasumi
Written by Yuki Hara and Atsumi Tsuchi
Starring Kanna Hashimoto, Gordon Maeda, Marin Honda, Kaito Sakurai, Seira Anzai, Fuku Suzuki and Yoshino Kimura
Re/Member: The Last Night Review
If you’re a horror fan that ever finds themselves in need of something new to watch I highly recommend checking out Netflix’s horror offerings. Not because they’re all great…or even overly plentiful. Because they love to shadow drop foreign horror movies. I didn’t know that a sequel to Re/Member, which Netflix dropped onto its service about three years ago. I had equally no idea that it was coming to Netflix again. They just love to pop up foreign horror with little to no fanfare.
Full disclosure: I didn’t remember (pun is impossible to avoid) anything about the original movie either. Re/Member: The Last Night puts a brief recap onto the beginning of the sequel…but it’s focused on things you need to know for this story more than helping recall the details of the first one. Looking back on my review of it I was able to piece together what the movie was about. Re/Member was a cleverly titled cursed horror movie about a group of teens caught in a time loop. They have to reassemble (or remember…as opposed to dismember) a corpse to break the loop. All while a ghost/demon thing hunts them down and kills them. Pieces of the body are hidden around the school that the characters keep finding themselves looping back into.
The main takeaway from 2023’s Re/Member is what it got wrong. It all felt very low stakes since any deaths would be undone by the start of the next loop. I noted that it worked better as a strange romance between its too leads…even though the threat of neither of them remembering (the title works both ways) any of the character growth they shared during the loops. Well, the movie solved some of that. The two main characters conveniently remember everything but everyone else forgets. Sloppy stuff but it made for an enjoyable enough watch.
Re/Member: The Last Night picks up three years after the original. It stars a new cast of schoolkids caught in a loop and tasked to assemble a body…but it does bring back the original’s two leads in some interesting ways. Apparently there was an unknown catch on the whole “escape the loop by reassembling the body” concept. It causes history to change…but the curse continues. The body they put back together was no longer dismembered in the past. That person continued to exist…and live out their life. But one of the survivors takes their place. As the new history has it…Asuka (Kanna Hashimoto) was dismembered thirteen years before The Last Night takes place. It happened at an amusement park…one that was special to her and fellow survivor/only people who remember what happened Takahiro (Gordon Maeda).
When a new crop of teens finds them caught in a time loop…it’s Asuka’s body parts they need to find and reassemble. Asuka is caught in some nether realm. Takahiro, who still remembers everything, is on a mission to bring her back…and end the curse once and for all. He doesn’t want someone else to take her place. He wants to break the chain. Asuka can help him accomplish this by destroying something wherever it is that she’s stuck…but it comes at its own cost. By now you have probably guessed why Re/Member: The Last Night doesn’t really improve upon its predecessor. It all gets too convoluted for its own good.
It does improve upon Re/Member in one key way, however. The stakes feel much higher this time. Yes, it has the same issues of characters who might not remember anything they did during the loops. Yes, there is a long montage of deaths that ultimately mean nothing. But the story of Asuka and Takahiro has more weight to it. Especially when Re/Member: The Last Night gets around to the second part of its title. Eventually, Takahiro is faced with just one last loop. One chance to undo everything and break the chain forever. Failure means permanent death for everyone.
That might not sound like a lot, but it is better than Re/Member managed to figure out. The truth is that the new characters are a bit shortchanged in The Last Night. We’ve seen other people do this dance before. With focus split on the Asuka/Takahiro story…they never had much of a chance to stand out. Like the first film, the romance/friendship story of the two characters is the best thing about The Last Night. It’s still not enough to make for a very good movie. Even with a bigger setting and some fun locations.
Scare Value
If you’re interested in more of the Asuka/Takahiro story from the original, The Last Night does some genuinely interesting things with it. The concept is still more fun on paper than it is in practice…even with a full amusement part to run through this time around. The new characters are likable but, ultimately, get shortchanged by a slight story without much time to fully develop them. I still say this would make for a great video game. It just hasn’t made for a good movie.
2/5
Re/Member: The Last Night Link
Streaming on Netflix
