A campy horror-comedy with enough moments of genuine terror and a touch/drop of comedy peppered in for that slice-of-life effect, Eiichirô Hasumi’s “Re/Member” is a unique film. The primary antagonist, or main monster of the game, at times looks like a man wearing a hairy suit and a mask, but the earnest acting of the teenage actors keeps you interested in the movie. An interesting movie with a few sections that might need re-watching to wrap your head around, “Re/member” can be seen as a pun because it’s about putting together the body parts of a dismembered corpse, as well as “remembering” one’s past after forgetting it. If you felt confused after finishing the movie, here are the answers to some of the burning questions you might have had.
Spoilers Ahead
What Is The Timeloop And How Can It Be Broken?
In Eiichirô Hasumi’s world, a psychotic event has been happening, with records going back to the early 20th century when “body searches” used to be conducted. In this twisted “game,” an 8-year-old child is killed under mysterious circumstances, and a group of random people is organized to look for the body parts while a monster known as the “Red Person” chases and viciously murders the searchers. However, death doesn’t end the perverse chase; the searchers wake up on the same day they start, and it continues as a cycle until all the body parts have been assembled. In the current story, on July 5, six students in a Japanese high school find themselves in the unfinished chapel of their school at night with a small child’s coffin on the altar. The coffin has space made out for a small child’s body to fit in there, and the six students are chased by the figure of a child entirely in red and carrying an immensely creepy doll, with the end goal of viciously murdering every student. The students are Takahiro, Atsushi, Shota, Asuka, Rie, and Rumiko. One by one, each student dies brutally and finds themselves living the previous day—the one when they got murdered.
The entirety of the events take place from Asuka’s perspective, and we see her trying to make sense of the situation, recalling every event again when it becomes apparent that every other student who was roped into the game also remembers every moment, right down to when they were murdered. Shota, who used to be bullied and derided for his appearance and loner attitude, finds the instructions for the brutal game they’ve become players in unwittingly, and the Russian website says that the game shall continue until every part of the child’s body has been discovered and placed inside the coffin. The same night repeats itself again and again as the students start growing closer and becoming friends, and they keep collecting parts of the child. Having lost track of the number of days they’ve relived the same day, the six students—now best friends—head into the house of the girl whose body parts they’ve been collecting. From the pictures of the girl’s family and the drawings the child made, the students understand that the 8-year-old Miko Onoyama was murdered brutally in her house, and the pictures show that she had a doll named Emily—the same creepy thing that “Red Person” carries—which was her most prized possession. Takahiro and Atsushi notice a part of the room boarded up with planks, and upon ripping them off, they find the freaky doll, Emily, with dried-up blood on it. However, Shota’s screams distract them, and the next moment they find the doll missing.
That night, the “Red Person” morphs into a freakishly tall monster that partly resembles Leatherface from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) and the Predator from the eponymous 1987 movie. After a fierce chase, the Emily monster eats Rie, and Asuka jumps to her death. When the students wake up on the same day, Rie has been wiped off the face of the earth, with everyone but the five of her friends forgetting about her existence. That night, the five students lay out an intricate plan to trap the monster, but its massive strength overpowers most of them, and Rumiko, Atsushi, and Shota get eaten. Takahiro sacrifices himself so that Asuka can complete the sickening game once and for all, and she manages to finally place the head with the rest of the body and close the sarcophagus. The next morning is July 6, and Rie is back, but all six students go back to how they used to be before ending up in the time loop. This looping nightmare is over, and the cycle is finally broken.
How Do The Unlikely High School Friends Know How To Defeat The Monster?
The six former classmates-turned-friends finally realize that to break the time loop, they need to place Miko’s head in the coffin, but even after scouring the entire school, the head is never found. All out of options and neck-deep in panic, the search party—minus Rie, who got erased—looks helpless until Asuka realizes that the head is inside Emily the doll. During one of the nights, while hiding inside the pool, she noticed the doll’s head sink as if it had some weight inside instead of floating. With this crucial information in mind, the five students create a detailed trap for the monster. Although the human-gobbling freak with brutish strength put up a tremendous fight and chomped down three of the comrades, Takahiro leaps at the diabolical entity and hacks off its head to reveal Miko’s head inside.
Even though the head is out and Takahiro and Asuka have gingerly made their way into the chapel, the monster chases them inside and eats Takahiro. The loss of the person Asuka had always had affection for sparks an unseen rage inside her, and she puts up a valiant struggle but is overpowered. All hope seems lost for the last surviving member of the group when a crucifix nails down the unholy spawn of evil, killing it and placing the head in the coffin, which relieves the six students of the curse of repeating the same day till the end of time.
How Does Takahiro Remember Asuka?
The downside of searching for the missing body parts of a dead child while a monster chases and kills you every day is that you forget the experience entirely and the friends you made along the way. The six students in “Re/Member” forget one another when the curse is lifted, but Takahiro returns to Asuka and says that he has found her as he promised. So how did the high school heartthrob remember his sweetheart?
As it turns out, if, during the process of completing the game, the members happen to attach some memory to a particular object, it can be used to bring back the memories they had created once the curse is lifted. Takahiro had admitted his affection for Asuka, given him his pin, and made the promise to find him when tomorrow finally arrived. Tomorrow did arrive, but Asuka didn’t remember anything, so fate must’ve been on their side because the six friends-turned-strangers were selected as members of the festival committee. While walking, Takahiro’s pin fell off Asuka’s pocket, which didn’t escape him. He picked it up, called out to Asuka, handed it to her, and she reminded him of his promise. An end-credits photograph showed the six of them as festival committee members, having rediscovered their friendship once more.
What Do The End Credits Mean?
If you stuck around till the end of credits in “Re/Member,” you must’ve seen the strange scene where we once again find the well where Asuka had seen the tiny hands crawling out of, and deep inside the well is a crumpled newspaper cutting. The cutting is about the death of 8-year-old Miko Onoyama with her photo, but the photograph, her name, and the location morph to now read that 8-year-old Asuka Morisaki was murdered at an amusement park. Strangely enough, the child’s face resembles that of a young version of the protagonist of the current story. Hasumi chooses to end his story here, but the questions remain.
Does the “Body Search” curse have the secret unwritten rule that whoever breaks the curse will be the next to die? If so, how could it be the 8-year-old version of Asuka? On the official website of “Find Your Body” (the Japanese name for “Re/Member”), Haruna Hashimoto, the actress who plays Asuka, said that it’s crucial to hang on till the end of the movie to understand what happened. It can be theorized that whoever ends the one-time loop will be the one cursed to die, so Asuka was sent back in time to be murdered. The newspaper cutting then talks about the death of the protagonist, but as a child. Perhaps the price of breaking the time loop has to die and wait until one’s body can be pieced back together for that cycle to end—only for another to begin.
If that hasn’t been head-scratching enough, try this one on: Takahiro casually mentions that he and Asuka had once headed to an amusement park as children, but she shushes him. Could that mean that she was killed when they visited the park and she has only been existing as a memory and once the timeloop was broken, she might have disappeared? Perhaps the news of her death becomes known only after she helps piece Miko’s body together and this starts yet another mystery.
It’s difficult to come to a conclusion unless Hasumi explains his vision or announces a sequel to his campy horror flick. If there is a “Re/Member 2,” with Asuka being the little girl whose body needs to be pieced back together, we might be onto something, but until then, we can only theorize.
