Still riding high off the success of 2024’s Trap, M. Night Shyamalan is back with the upcoming romantic thriller Remain. The film is a part of a collaboration he undertook with author Nicholas Sparks. Coming from different genres, the pair challenged each other and co-wrote a New York Times Best Selling novel of the same name, which was released last year.
Now, Shyamalan is teasing that the film the duo wrote is the “highest-testing” of his career.
The film version of Remain stars Jake Gyllenhaal (The Bride), Phoebe Dynevor (Thrash), and Julie Hagerty (Matlock). It tells the story of an architect who is suffering from depression. In a bid to change their circumstances, he moves to Cape Cod and meets a mysterious woman.
However, the filmmaker was clear that this isn’t your run-of-the-mill adaptation. “The novel is not a novelization, and the film is not an adaptation. It’s two storytellers telling the story of Remain in their own way,” Shyamalan explains at Warner Bros. Discovery’s upfront advertiser presentation. “Together, we created the story of recluse architect Tate Gordon, who moves to a small coastal town to complete his latest project when he encounters a beguiling young woman who pulls him out of his shell and into the center of a deadly mystery that hangs over this town.”
“Just between us, it’s my highest-testing movie of my career,” he adds. “We’re now in post-production, finding every detail. Honestly, my hope is that when you experience Remain, you feel both sides of it at once — full of love and that quiet, lingering unease that doesn’t let you go.”
Creating Remain
Given that books are often adapted into movies, or vice versa, writing for both mediums at the same time is certainly an interesting idea. Doubly so, when the creators come from such seemingly different genres. Thankfully, Shyamalan did dive into that process a bit more.
“My new movie began with a conversation, an unexpected one, with a celebrated author, Nicholas Sparks,” Shyamalan says. “He sold more than 130 million books worldwide and wrote one of the most iconic love stories ever, The Notebook. Romance is his territory. Mine’s a little different. I’m drawn to suspense, to twists and tension and stories that leave you just a little unsettled long after they are over. That feels like home to me.”
“We started from nothing, just a couple of questions: What scares you? What moves you? What stays with you? We challenged each other,” he explains. “We traded ideas and slowly wove two very different perspectives into a single, thrilling, supernatural love story. In the end, we get to tell it our own way. Mine through film, Nicholas through his novel.”
Remain is currently set to hit theaters on February 5, 2027.
