VeteranLight
I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.
Beanbioca
As Good As It Gets
MoPoshy
Absolutely brilliant
paul2001sw-1
'What Remains' takes the classic Agatha Christie formula and updates it to the modern age: take a dead body, a house full of individuals all on the nasty end of normal, and a determined, dogged retired detective, and save the unveiling of the criminal to the final moments. In fact, whereas Christie's characters were generally thin, the characterisation is more convincing in this, although never truly surprising. The direction and acting are also highly competent, although the conclusion descends into (almost inevitable) silliness. Until that point, it's quite gripping, but also quite shallow: whatever remains, not that much lies beneath the surface.
Prismark10
When the decomposed body of Melissa Young is found by a couple in their new flat, Detective Len Harper who is approaching retirement is determined to discover what happened to her and why nobody noticed she was missing for so long.This is really an old fashioned 'whodunnit.' The building is a house converted into 5 flats and nearly all the residents are not very nice people at all, some with serious issues.It is rather slow going, there is a lot of psychological games and this shows via flashbacks to their behaviour towards the victim who was an obese female.The detective on his one last case before retirement is doggedly persistent and there is an air of a Gothic melodrama which the finale very much confirms as there are twists after twists as to who the culprit might be.
jc-osms
This four part thriller shown on the BBC on consecutive Sundays turned out to be an excursion into modern-day Gothic melodrama mixed in with a good old-fashioned whodunit. Along the way it tries to make points about neighbourliness, loneliness and control as all of the inhabitants of a small block of flats conveniently seem to forget about the existence of the young, fat, solitary female who lived in the top-floor flat until two years after her disappearance, her bodily remains are discovered in the loft above her apartment, triggering the narrative.Cue red-herrings galore and a backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards use of flashback to fill in the lead-up to the slain girl's demise. The viewer is kept guessing as to who the actual perpetrator is with a veritable procession of possible candidates paraded before us, including a seedy old teacher and the mysterious young woman he keeps in his flat, a pair of lesbians, one nasty and dominating, the other humane but servile, a careworn divorcée male newspaper editor, his reporter girlfriend and surly, hormonal teenage son, who are all joined by a young couple, him a feckless jack-the-lad, her a good-natured Indian girl, heavily pregnant, who move into the flat below the dead girl's and who actually make the grisly discovery.Brought into investigate the death is crusty old soon-to-retire police detective David Threlfall, another Mr Lonely himself, who seems to relate to the dead girl so much that he pursues the case even after his last day on the job (and after his former colleagues have all moved on to their next cases) to the extent of staying overnight in her long abandoned flat, indeed for the epilogue we see him actually living there. He hits it off with the young mum-to-be and together they try to solve the mystery, indeed they are, along with the girl reporter, the only halfway decent people in the whole cast, the rest being an unappealing mixture of the venal, duplicitous, vindictive and just plain mean. For me this made it hard to relate to the bulk of the characters and stretched credibility to breaking point, I mean just how many horrible people can you fit into a block of flats at the same time?Anyway, it winds it way to an over-the-the-top gory ending, with more than one dumb way to die along the way. Somewhere in it all is probably a moral about looking out for your neighbours, but along the road, the writer and director seemingly got consumed by some mystical Gothic bug and decided to try and whip up a kind of "I Know What You Did In the Loft" finale. It's reasonably well acted, although I'm tiring a little of Stephen MacKintosh's pained look in every character he portrays but on the whole this was an okay, if very incredible, whodunit, whydunit and howdunit which at least had me stumped up until the end.
FlagSteward
At heart, What Remains is an updated version of the country-house who-dunnit, a woman is murdered in a house that's been converted into 5 flats, and it's assumed that one of the other residents did it.There's few tangible clues as to what happened so there's little for forensics to do - this is not CSI/Silent Witness. Instead the clues lie in the psychology and relationships of the residents - it's a bit Stephen Poliakoff in the way they're all prisoners of their pasts. So it explores the relationships of the suspects in a depth that you wouldn't normally see from Miss Marple.Then on top of that you've got a few classic horror-movie buttons being pushed (not altogether successfully) and the hangdog detective working past his retirement date on just one last case. "You've all given up on finding the murderer, we owe it to this girl to find out what happened". It's a cliché because it works.I can see why some people find the first half a bit slow, it's deliberately meant to be "static" and a bit claustrophobic with the vast majority of the action happening within the house. It maybe helped that I recorded it and watched the whole thing in one sitting, so didn't have a week to think about how little had apparently happened in any one episode.On the other hand there's a few sub-plots in the middle that don't move the plot forward at all, they're just there so Giedroyc can expand his theme of loneliness in the city. It feels a bit self-indulgent when some of the residents' stories are left hanging at the end, either because he didn't know where to go or 20 minutes got left on the cutting room floor, it would be more satisfying if they had been resolved. I suppose it says something that you do care enough to want to know how things work out for them.So this is not a show for people looking for car chases and shootouts. Personally I preferred Jane Campion's Top of the Lake which the BBC aired in the same slot a few weeks before. But if you've run out of Scandinavian detective box-sets to watch then this is a decent enough way to spend an evening.
