Shyamalan Surprises Beyond Fest With 'Remain' Premiere

M. Night Shyamalan gave Los Angeles no warning before showing his new film.

The thriller Remain had its world premiere as a surprise screening on Tuesday night at Beyond Fest, the genre festival in Los Angeles, according to Variety reporting on 30 September.

The crowd expected something else entirely. The evening had been organised as a retrospective presentation of Shyamalan’s 1998 hit The Sixth Sense. Instead, festivalgoers saw the new film first.

First posts from the screening were warm for the leads. Early social media reactions singled out Jake Gyllenhaal as “incredible,” Variety reported.

Remain is described as a supernatural romance, a love story with ghostly elements. It was co-written by Shyamalan and Nicholas Sparks, the novelist behind The Notebook. It is scheduled for release in February.

Gyllenhaal plays Tate Gordon, a New York architect. He travels to Cape Cod to design a summer home for his best friend after treatment for acute depression, according to Variety.

Phoebe Dynevor, known for Bridgerton, plays Wren. She is a young woman who upends Tate’s ordered world while he is mourning the death of his sister.

Critic Griffin Schiller was among the first to post a fuller response. He said the film shows Shyamalan at his “most earnest and sincere” and called it a heartfelt and romantic throwback to his early work, as reported by Variety.

Schiller described Gyllenhaal as a “perfect Shyamalan lead, subdued but soulful,” and Dynevor as “magnetic.” Other early posts echoed that focus on the two central performances.

For fans following the calendar, this means the first word arrived months out. The February release is still to come, and the surprise premiere put the cast and the Cape Cod story into public view early.