What I Remember

Screens at noon on Saturday, October 17 at Nightmares Film Festival.

by George Wolf

Equal parts mystery, found footage thriller and exploration of queer identity, writer director Alex Hera’s impressive first feature What I Remember casts a truly hypnotic spell .

Ryan (Cabe Thompson) and Sam (Alexandra Boulas) have a fateful meeting one afternoon in the woods around their small town of Brookhaven. Ryan is constantly recording a video diary, and we see his POV as he stumbles upon Sam and her friend Drew (Taylor Morris) having a heated argument.

After breaking free of Drew, Ryan and Sam walk the trails together, sparking a tender and empathetic friendship that builds to something deeper, one that anchors Hera’s tale of shifting timelines, awakening identities and persistence of memory.

Ryan and Sam hatched a plan to leave town together, but Ryan’s disappearance left Sam grasping for answers. As Hera employs a data-moshing technique to blur the edges of time, place and vlog footage, another mystery from the past comes to light. The whereabouts of Hayden, a long-missing local gay man, have never been uncovered, sparking unmistakable questions about local threats to those in the queer community.

Boulas is terrific in a performance that only improves as the emotions of the narrative deepen. Hera mines those feelings with great care, leaving What I Remember as a collective of sketches that build to a mysterious meditation on finding the people and places that allow you to find yourself.