Suddenly, M. Night Shyamalan impromptu launching a YouTube channel last week makes a lot more sense.
The esteemed writer-director has a new film coming out, in the form of Remain. The first trailer just dropped for the film amid reports that the film has allegedly been test-screening to some of the most positive results of Shyamalan’s whole career, even netting a more positive score than his iconic ‘90s thriller, The Sixth Sense. Beyond the fact that it’s a Shyamalan movie, the trailer for Remain does a great job of teasing the tone of the film and emphasizing the sheer strength of his collaborators here, while revealing relatively little about the plot or narrative as a whole.
For the vast majority of his films, Shyamalan has worked as the sole screenwriter. He is a true-blue auteur, so much so that it painted a target on his back in the mid-‘00s, when he was releasing films like The Village or Lady in the Water, which weren’t received particularly well at the time and led to a whole culture of toxic discourse surrounding the filmmaker. However, Remain is a notable exception to this rule, as the screenplay is only co-written by Shyamalan, with the other contributor being none other than Nicholas Sparks.
If you happen to be unfamiliar with Sparks, you’re almost certainly familiar with his work. Sparks was something of an IP unto himself for a stretch of decades after the prolific romance author began getting his books adapted into movies. The most famous and influential of these was undoubtedly The Notebook, a film that is still talked about with immense reverence and had a huge impact on the trajectory of the romance genre over the twenty years. Sparks has had nearly a dozen of his novels adapted to the big screen in the interim, many of which were obscenely successful.
Which brings us back to the inevitable question: what is Nicholas Sparks doing co-writing an M. Night Shyamalan movie?
Well, Remain looks to be something of a supernatural romance story, centering on a relationship of some kind between Jake Gyllenhaal’s main character and the mysterious character played by Phoebe Dynevor. So in this way, it would appear to be something of a blend between Shyamalan’s more horror-indebted craft and Sparks’ more lyrical romanticism. This is all well and good and will be absolutely fascinating to witness, but the true draw of Remain for me is the idea of Shyamalan as a director pairing up with Gyllenhaal as an actor.
Jake Gyllenhaal is a great actor who brings an insane level of commitment to every project he does, regardless of the actual quality of the film. That has led to his filmography becoming a bit scatter-shot in recent years, but I do believe he still has greatness within him. For his part, Shyamalan is coming off of his 2024 film Trap, which is, for my money, the best thing he’s ever made and features an all-timer performance from a similarly committed yet occasionally underutilized actor, Josh Hartnett. Trap proved to be the perfect vehicle for Hartnett, and my hope is very much that Shyamalan can pull off a similar trick with Gyllenhaal here.
Regardless, this is a stellar tone-setter of a trailer, and I admire the audaciousness of doing a full-blown Valentine’s Day release for this thing. One to keep an eye on come 2027, for sure.
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