Everybody cleeps.

Do you remember the sixth night of July? Doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Re/Member is a teen horror film from Japan brought to the west by Netflix that really isn’t much of a horror at all but a live-action anime similar in horror value to something like Assassination Classroom. Which is fitting because the director Eiichirô Hasumi also directed the live action Assassination Classroom movie in 2015. Is it spoopy? In the beginning, kind of. But Re/Member feels like watching people living through a video game and one like Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

I guess it depends on how you want to view the movie. Re/Member is about a group of six students who find themselves in quite the pickle. Outside of being a group of stereotype Japanese High School students from the class president to the loner girl with a heart of gold to the brooding aloof guy, to the perpetual bullying victim literally named Shota. The six classmates who don’t normally pay attention to each other are thrust into quite the circumstance when they are all brutally murdered by an eight year old demon girl who carries around a big stuffed bear and is dripping in blood.

Only they aren’t dead, as they wake up to find that the day has started all over again and they are the only ones who retain their memories of the night before. Thank Christ this is an anime because noted dweeb Shota just so happens to have been researching this exact phenomenon. What a coincidence. Also their teacher may know a little more than he’s letting on about the whole thing. Turns out what they’re caught in is called the Body Search, where a chosen few students are selected to relive the same night over and over again until they can find all the body parts and reassemble a dismembered eight year old child.

Be thankful you don’t live in Japan, this movie is a documentary and Ju-on spirits are as common as rain. You may be wondering how such a phenomenon was thoroughly documented and then published in a book despite being utterly insane and apparently everyone involved losing their memories afterward, and to answer that question I’d like to posit one of my own: shut up. Stuff that pretty little head of yours with more popcorn and less questions.

For what it’s worth the movie is well made. It’s a slasher with the kind of premise any director would love to have, namely the ability to kill the protagonists over and over again. The fact that everyone gets killed nightly and comes back for more punishment the next day allows the film to keep the cast to a relative minimum while giving the writers the authority to come up with new and exciting ways to kill everyone. The characters even start to bond over their shared trauma of experiencing painful death repeatedly.

Aren’t things grand?

The downside of this is that for a film that is an hour and forty five minutes, there only seem to be real stakes for about fifteen minutes of that runtime. Character deaths are purely for our amusement as we know those characters are just going to come back again for the next night. It reminded me a lot of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a horror game where death isn’t as much a punishment as it is a small setback that actually makes the game easier for you.

The little girl is spookier than the monster that shows up later on in the film because eight year old Japanese girls are creepy and exponentially creepier when they have no eyeballs and are covered in blood. The second monster is kinda silly, its practical effect form looking like a big muppet out of Sesame Street. Like a creepypasta Chewbacca clone. Re/Member is ruined by its post-credits ending which comes out of nowhere and is stupid and as far as I can tell has no lead up to explain why it happens. It’s just so they can tease a sequel that I’m sure will come out in 2025.

My final verdict on Re/Member is this; I’d probably have enjoyed it more if I was the type that never got tired of cliche Japanese anime school character tropes.

Rating: C+