What I Remember (2024) Film Review – A Glitchy, Heartfelt Tale of Queerness, Memory, and Rural Isolation [Unnamed Footage Festival]

Posted on by Javiera Vega

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In the sun-bleached stillness of Brookehaven, a rural town that feels both timeless and suffocating, two strangers form a fragile but radiant bond. What I Remember is the debut feature of Alex Hera, a writer-director with a distinct sensitivity to the quiet horrors of daily life. Shot in the summer of 2024 with a low-budget, DIY ethos, this found footage-adjacent drama blends lo-fi aesthetics, digital decay, and raw emotional storytelling to explore identity, memory, and belonging.

Ryan (Cabe Thompson) is an introverted vlogger who documents everything through their camcorder, more comfortable behind the lens than in front of it. One aimless day, while wandering the forest, they stumble upon Sam (Alexandra Boulas), a defiant misfit in the middle of an argument. Ryan intervenes, sparking an unlikely friendship that quickly grows into something deeper. Through Ryan’s constant filming, we see their bond unfold—awkward conversations, confessions at sunrise while sharing a beer, whispered dreams of leaving Brookehaven behind. The camera becomes a witness, a shield, and eventually, a lifeline.

But in the present, Ryan has gone missing. Sam, left behind, scours the old footage, trying to make sense of what happened. What unfolds isn’t a linear mystery, but a fractured emotional journey. Memory here is unreliable and haunting—captured through ghostly glitches, overlapping audio, and datamoshed images that collapse time and space. Hera smartly eschews a clean narrative arc for something messier and more truthful. Just like grief, the film loops, fixates, and rewinds.

While a found footage film, What I Remember isn’t scary in the traditional sense. The real terror lies in being unseen, unaccepted, or worse—forgotten. Both Ryan and Sam are outsiders in a town that offers them no safe space. The film touches on queerness, gender non-conformity, and the latent violence of small-town life, but never in a heavy-handed way. Instead, these themes are woven through disapproving glances, offhand comments, and moments where the footage lingers just a bit too long.

Not everything lands. Some performances can feel stiff, and the narrative occasionally drifts too far into abstraction. But when What I Remember hits, it resonates. There’s a scene—simple, unassuming—where Sam watches old recordings of her and Ryan together as he tries different things that clearly aligns with his identity, encouraged by her quiet support. It’s a tender, joyful moment, played back again and again until the tape begins to warp. It’s devastating in its simplicity, capturing that very human ache to hold on to something ephemeral.

Alex Hera proves with this film that memory can be an aesthetic, and emotion a form of storytelling. What I Remember isn’t about plot—it’s about presence. It’s a slow-burning, poetic exploration of queer connection and the inevitable gaps between what we record and what we remember.

If you’re looking for a conventional thriller or a neatly resolved drama, look elsewhere. But if you’re drawn to emotionally textured films like Skinamarink—works that live in mood and fragment—this is a journey worth taking.

We watched What I Remember (2024) at this year’s Unnamed Footage Festival.

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