Film
What Remains
A quietly observant short film about reconnection and displacement. Leila returns to her uncle's American suburban home after thirteen years away, and a day of gathering unfolds with the weight of time and distance. It's tender, precise, and interested in what people don't say—the small rituals and silences that mark belonging and exile. For viewers who love intimate, character-driven cinema.
If you liked this
The Farewell2019
A portrait of family and cultural displacement with similar emotional intelligence. Lulu Wang finds humor and heartbreak in the gap between what's spoken and felt, between two worlds claiming one person.
But It's a comedy-drama that can feel scattered in tone if you're expecting something more consistently serious or light.
A Ghost Story2017
Another short-form meditation on time, absence, and what lingers. Lowery strips cinema down to its essence—a sheet, a house, the weight of memory—and it's devastating in ways that accumulate slowly.
But It's deliberately slow and strange. The central image is unconventional, and patience isn't optional.
Minari2021
A family drama about immigration, aspiration, and the cost of reinvention. Lee Isaac Chung captures the texture of displacement with warmth and without sentimentality.
But Some find its pacing meandering, and the emotional beats can feel understated if you're used to more conventional drama.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from What Remains
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
A Tale of Two Sisters2003
Both use a single house and family gathering to explore what time and distance do to bonds. A Tale of Two Sisters explodes this idea into Gothic nightmare.
A South Korean horror film that uses a house as a space of trauma and fractured memory. Like What Remains, it's interested in what happens inside families and what the surface conceals—but it weaponizes those silences into something supernatural.
But It's classified as horror, and while it's more unsettling than jump-scare loud, the violence and body-centered terror won't appeal to everyone.
More like this (7)
The Death of Dick Long2019
A dark comedy that observes small-town strangeness and male friendship with surgical precision. It's alert to the gap between surfaces and what actually drives people.
But The subject matter is grim, and the humor is very dark—it won't feel warm or reassuring.
A Master Builder2014
Brady Corbet's adaptation of Ibsen is about ambition, family, and the architecture of a life. It moves like a chamber piece, all compressed emotion and architectural metaphor.
But It's a literary adaptation that requires engagement with Ibsen's ideas; it's slow and densely layered.
The Florida Project2017
Sean Baker observes lives on the margins with compassion and without condescension. It's interested in childhood, precarity, and the small dramas of survival.
But It follows children through poverty; the emotional weight comes from what's unstable and precarious about their world.
Krisha2016
Ari Aster's feature debut uses a real family and a single house to explore recovery, grace, and whether change is possible. It's intimate and spiritually curious.
But It's explicitly about addiction and recovery; it's slow, unadorned, and asks for belief in grace that not everyone will share.
Certain Women2016
Kelly Reichardt traces three lives in Montana with economy and depth. Each story is brief, partial, observant—structured like the short film you're watching.
But It's composed of fragments; there's no conventional plot, and some viewers find this frustrating rather than liberating.
Pariyerum Perumal2018
Both are about displacement and belonging through the lens of family. Pariyerum Perumal makes the social forces explicit where What Remains leaves them as atmosphere.
A Tamil-language legal drama about caste, marriage, and the law. It's urgent and structurally precise, but also moves with observational quiet about family conflict and the cost of principle.
But It's in Tamil with subtitles, and it engages directly with caste hierarchy—subject matter that requires cultural literacy and doesn't resolve tidily.
The Souvenir2019
Both are short films (The Souvenir is 139 minutes but feels like a fragment of something larger) about the distance between what we assume we know about people and what's actually there.
Honor Swinton Byrne's debut is an essay on memory, art, and the unreliability of what we think we've witnessed in those closest to us. It's fragmented, formally experimental, and about grief disguised as a love story.
But It's deliberately obscure about its own narrative; it requires you to sit with ambiguity and won't explain itself. Some find it alienating rather than evocative.
People
Cast
Directing
- Anahita GhazvinizadehDirector
Production
- Zoe Sua ChoProducer