Remain Teases A Ghostly Romance From M. Night Shyamalan And... Nicholas Sparks?
The last collaboration you’d expect delivers an intriguing paranormal tale.
M. Night Shyamalan has always marched to the beat of his own drum, as the delightfully demented Trap reminded us all in 2024. The director that pundits once heralded as “The Next Spielberg” is a different kind of artist entirely, one whose moves are far harder to predict. At this point, though, that’s part of the fun of getting a new Shyamalan movie. One day we’re on the beach that makes you old; the next we’re in a haunted house with Jake Gyllenhaal and Phoebe Dynevor. Never a dull moment!
It’s the latter that shapes the premise for Shyamalan’s next effort, Remain. An “otherworldly collaboration” between the director and romance author Nicholas Sparks, the film is a concerted departure from the dark-and-stormy pics Shyamalan spent the past few years working on. Ironically, Remain was Shyamalan’s original concept — Sparks penned a novel based on his script, which hit shelves earlier this year. It’s a surprising pivot for the author, whose novels were near-constant material for film adaptations in the 2000s and 2010s. (The last gasp of the Sparks book-to-movie pipeline came with 2016’s The Choice, which makes this collab all the more unorthodox.)
“I don’t think anybody has ever done what we just did, which was take the same story and simultaneously go do our separate things,” Sparks told AP in 2025. “It’s two people doing two different art forms from the same story. I trusted him 100% to make the best film version of that story possible, and he trusted me.”
With the first trailer for Remain finally out in the world, the final stage of this bizarre experiment is poised to unfold on the big screen. Stranger still, though... it actually doesn’t look half-bad. Sure, you can’t teach an older dog like Sparks any new tricks, but there’s a reason his given tropes — the moody, hunky architect, for one, or a one-sided obsession framed as a noble, selfless pursuit — were catnip to romance readers once upon a time.
10 years ago, a guy like Tate (Gyllenhaal) would have half the world swooning; now, he’s a walking checklist for the Sparksian savior figure. Remain’s official synopsis describes him as a “reclusive architect” (strike one) who moves to a “small coastal town” (strike two) and connects with Dynevor’s mystery woman, Wren, a beautiful enigma that he can speak to but never touch. That’d be enough to count Sparks out if said mystery woman weren’t so obviously a ghost: Remain’s paranormal stylings, courtesy of Shyamalan, make the inherent weirdness of this dynamic feel purposeful. Before Wren strays too far into manic-pixie territory, the trailer switches the tempo, revealing what lies beneath this seemingly sweet bond with haunting imagery (and great cinematography from Train Dreams DP Adolpho Veloso).
Tate’s bond with Wren will draw him deeper into this town’s dark secrets, which, again, feels trite — but hey, it might be a fun ride all the same. Shyamalan’s work is best approached with zero cynicism; if audiences could open their hearts to something like Trap, we might also find something to love in this bizarre riff on paranormal romance.
