I Still See You is a 2018 thriller about an apocalyptic event that killed millions and left the world inhabited by ghosts.
For most of us who have lost a loved one, there is a kind of feeling that they’ve never actually left, their memories a part of us. We perhaps ‘see’ them sometimes in familiar places or triggered by something that reminds us of them while they were here. On some level, this is what lies at the heart of director Scott Speer‘s latest thriller I Still See You, a ghost story with a light twist that abandones that tract for something else, having a genuinely compelling start and a premise with a host of hooks but stumbles in getting it to have any impact.
Ten years ago, near Chicago, a cataclysmic accident at a research lab causes a horrific chain of horror that leaves no physical destruction but the instant death of millions. This wave of rippling energy however didn’t exactly finish the job per se as now the area is home to remnants, or ‘rems’ as they are called, basically ghosts who just show up for a bit and then disappear in a puff of smoke, repeating this ad nauseum. A decade on, its become a way of life, and for Veronica Calder (Bella Thorne), who lost her father and sees him every morning at the breakfast table, she’s tries to move on even as it seems more of these rems appear to be showing up. None are harmless though, just doing their thing until one day, Bella gets visited by a rem in her bathroom she’s never seen before who, with a steely-eyed intensity, offers her a word of warning drawn in the steam of her mirror: Run.
Based on the novel Break My Heart One Thousand Times by Daniel Waters, I Still See You is a paint-by-numbers young adult story that doesn’t offer much challenge beyond the potential of the strong start. Bella is a your typical angsty high school girl who doesn’t quite accept what everyone else is, frustrated with her mother (Amy Price-Francis) and debating her school teacher (Dermot Mulroney) over what a rem can and cannot do. This leads her to the company of hunky Kirk Lane (Richard Harmon), a transfer student with his own obsessions with uncovering the truth about rems, part of a movement called ‘truthers’.
With opening narration and a string of exposition-heavy moments that fill us in on the story, the movie isn’t lacking some good ideas, with the first third more interesting than the rest when it plays too close to conventions. However, it’s also tonally awkward, shifting from tried and true horror cliché jumpscares to limp attempts at suspense that don’t feel earned. The film refuses to develop any of these people or their stories into anything binding, shoehorning the whole thing into a generic experience.
That said, Thorne is very good, the young actor proving again that she’s able to carry a film with strong physical and emotional presence. She’s genuinely convincing but strapped to a film that holds her back with obvious characters and a plot that skips larger potential for a standard mystery. Absolutely, there is an audience for this, and Thorne deserves a following but for most, I Still See You will be a letdown.