Good start, but then it gets ruined

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Weird film but a good weird almost hypnotic....a dreamy atmosphere even the music is trance like. I was quite transfixed. Both of the leads were excellent. This is the type of film that leaves you to make your own conclusions...a very interesting watch!

They Remain sits solidly within the weird tradition of film -- in that you get what you bring to it.It will not answer your questions for you. Instead it will give you unnerving and tantalizing insights into a world that seems quite like our own -- beautiful and safe. Yet beneath that veneer, there is rot and there is madness, and They Remain does not shrink from that horror.Will you?

They Remain is a triumphant, beautiful, meticulous, difficult, challenging, intentionally abstract and recursive film. As such, it's likely to also be a divisive one. For those who didn't have the patience for, say, The Witch, They Remain will probably drive you nuts. But for those who are willing to meet the film where it is, rather than expecting it to come to you, I think that you will be amply rewarded.I hesitate to even call They Remain a slow burn. The words "slow burn" give the implication that it takes a while for things to get started, that they smolder for a long time before finally bursting into flame. When the first frame of They Remain flashes up on screen, things have already gotten strange, and that strangeness just continues to accrete on every surface, on every character, on everyone and everything for the remainder of the film's running time. It's a recursive movie, as I said, which means that it doesn't have a typical movie's build to some sort of satisfying (or unsatisfying, for that matter) climax. It turns back in on itself time and again. Do things get stranger? Sure. But do they really, or have they been that strange the whole time?They Remain isn't a movie that offers easy answers. In fact, it isn't even a movie that offers difficult ones. It's a film that opens itself up to myriad interpretations, all of them potentially valid, without ever offering even the most astute observer one particular "solution" to seize upon. For some viewers that may prove infuriating, but when a movie tells you repeatedly that you won't understand it, even as early as in the quote that shows up before the first shot of the film actually appears, you may only have yourself to blame if you walk out of it unsatisfied.

Ponderous, pretentious and emotionally stunted, those are my lasting impressions of They Remain. Whilst the back story holds together well enough, any promise this film might have had is wasted. This is a ponderously slow burn thriller that's laboriously wanders from vague pretentious symbolic abstraction to abstraction, offering the viewer a visual feast but a contextual famine. The result is an aimless affair where the key characters are so caught up in the visual symbolism and inexplicable, moody, mono-tonal narrative, that any emotional range, that might have helped build the tension this thriller desperately needs, is lost. In conclusion, a dissatisfying film, that wants to go somewhere but forgot to ask for directions. 4/10 from me.