On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.
First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”
The Bait: Spoiler Alert! Robert Pattinson Dies in 9/11
The reason After Dark is covering 2010’s “Remember Me” is technically a gigantic spoiler, but it’s also the only thing that anyone even remotely remembers (pun not intended) about Allen Coulter’s romantic drama. On its surface and for about 90 percent of its runtime, “Remember Me” is a very straightforward and not particularly memorable story about boy meets girl. He’s depressed after his brother’s suicide — and has daddy issues! She’s traumatized after witnessing her mother’s murder — and has daddy issues! Can these two crazy kids make it work?
Should the film end on the scene where Ally (Emilie de Ravin) and Tyler (Robert Pattinson) say I love you, “Remember Me” would most likely go down in history as an early career footnote in Pattinson’s trajectory from “Twilight” star and teen romantic lead to exciting indie cinema weirdo. But instead, as Tyler’s younger sister Caroline (Ruby Jerins) sits down for homeroom, the final scene of “Remember Me” pans over to reveal the date “September 11, 2001” scrawled on her teacher’s chalkboard.
The scene cuts to Tyler, waiting in his dad’s office for a meeting, looking out the window, as the camera slowly zooms out to reveal he is high within (wait for it) the World Trade Center. The rest is, especially at the time of the film’s release on March 12, 2010, very recent history.
Contrary to certain social media claims made today, “Remember Me” doesn’t entirely keep its audience in the dark before its sudden lurch into tragedy. The film starts with a prologue set in 1991, the Twin Towers are very prominent in the background of the train station where Ally’s mother (played in a deliriously random cameo by Martha Plimpton) gets shot in a robbery, and it’s explicitly mentioned that 10 years have passed when the film picks up with Ally and Tyler meeting as angsty NYU students.
Scenes where the two take a Labor Day trip together, or Tyler sees “American Pie 2” (which, yes, was released the summer before 9/11), further narrow the gap in which their big city romance could occur, and make the whiplash of its tremendously dark ending just a smidge easier to predict. But regardless of any foreshadowing, the gambit “Remember Me” pulls in telling a small-scale story about family issues and young love abruptly colliding with mass-casualty tragedy was, at best, polarizing — and, at worst, widely derided when the film hit audiences. (Again, no pun intended!)
New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called it a “shamelessly exploitative end.” And in a generally positive review, Roger Ebert wrote that, “The movie tries to borrow profound meaning, but succeeds only in upstaging itself so overwhelmingly that its characters become irrelevant.” A more withering take came from Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News, who said, “There’s no shame in exploring tragedy through art. But exploiting it to make your very ordinary movie feel more important? That’s another story.”
The film didn’t necessarily face any mainstream backlash beyond critics: it grossed a respectable $56 million on a $16 million budget, and won Pattinson a Teen Choice Award (he was hilariously also nominated for a Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award… seriously). As the years went on, the sheer force of the film’s tragic ending overshadowed everything else about it, and it now mostly resurfaces annually as “that film where Robert Pattinson dies in 9/11.”
On the internet, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks often sees posts about “Remember Me” go viral on platforms like X and Bluesky. Or, scrolling through TikTok, you can find reaction videos of creators showing their unsuspecting friends the film’s conclusions and recording their reactions to the final scene. Letterboxd reviews mocking the ending often pull thousands of likes, and always prompt questions that ultimately boil down to, “What the hell were these filmmakers thinking?”
Coulter, whose directorial debut “Hollywoodland” was well-received, has only worked in TV since. Screenwriter Will Fetters went onto co-write 2018’s “A Star is Born,” and explained in an interview shortly after the release of “Remember Me” that its story was partially based on his own experiences as a young man living in New York City around the time of the attacks. The intention was not to pull the rug out from underneath the audience, but to capture the sudden emotion people like Fetters really experienced.
“I had some personal tragedy in my life and this broader event occurred and it dovetailed what I experienced as a young man into the same kind of anger and sadness that follows, and this story, this script, was a way to kind of work it out,” Fetters told ComingSoon.net. “I don’t get why we’re exploitive for making a really small movie that essentially deals with the emotion of the day.”
The disgust is understandable, but nowadays, people are far more likely to laugh at “Remember Me” than anything else. 25 years after that fated date, 9/11 is for good or for bad one of the internet’s favorite memes, and you don’t have to look hard to find absurdist riffing on the events with real success.
This desensitization can be chalked up to many things. Some have pointed toward Gen Z growing older and having never experienced the attack as anything but history. Others say the culture has now largely moved on to the War on Terror that consumed the U.S. for more than two decades afterwards. There’s also plenty to be said for the way 9/11 continues to be weaponized in bad faith to fuel Islamaphobia. Whatever the root cause, perspective on that catastrophic moment is different now — and in 2026, “Remember Me’s” pivot from gentle romantic drama to world-shaking tragedy is pretty funny.
I was only 2 years old when 9/11 happened; at the time, my family lived in New York City. Growing up in nearby Long Island, where my parents moved partially due to fear of what would happen next, the attacks felt like a distant but ever-present part of my life. My schools had yearly remembrance ceremonies, and the stories of what my parents and their friends were doing that day were constant.
But having come of age essentially in an ecosystem defined by the terrorist attacks rather than disrupted by them, I know very little emotionally about what that day was like, and how it felt to feel the world flip on its head within a single morning. Ali, what do you think? Is “Remember Me” and its ending exploitative, laughable, or is there something poignant to be found in its whiplash? —Wilson Chapman
The Bite: Never Forget… Never Forgive.
OK, I know that’s not really the takeaway from “Remember Me” — or the anniversary of 9/11. But I do hold something of a grudge against Coulter’s 2010 indie film, if only because my memory of truly enjoying it at the time feels so ridiculous in hindsight. Growing up in Washington, D.C., I was 5 years old the day the Twin Towers fell in 2001. Terrorists simultaneously targeted the Pentagon, sending my father into a the nation’s capital to report on one of the gravest days in U.S. history. Meanwhile, my mother was busy picking my sister and I up from our local elementary school during the only real “code blue” we ever had.
My memories of “Remember Me” are, uh, different.
A repeat selection in the string of indie film trailers I watched habitually back then (it’s cut really well, watch it!), I remember basking in the idea of this film for months — but for the life of me cannot now recall the first time I actually watched it. Whatever Coulter and Fetters’ intentions, I can’t in good conscience tell you I was ever legitimately devastated by this movie.
I am, however, 100 percent confident I could find you a photo of the haircut I got after specifically using Emilie de Ravin’s Ally as a reference with my hairstylist. (Note: I wasn’t blonde then, but my mother even pulled out an old dress of hers that I wore obsessively because it matched the scene in which Ally and Tyler go to meet his dad.)
As a 14-year-old girl growing up in Maryland, I was obsessed with the fast-talking low-budget august movies that played at my beloved Bethesda Row. From “Juno” to “500 Days of Summer,” snappy dialogue anchored many of my favorite dramedies — and, despite not being much of a “Twilight” fan, I distinctly remember obsessing over Pattinson’s cadence in the “Remember Me” promo. In fact, rewatching it with Wilson today, I can practically recite the damn thing: a nostalgic feat for which I am both slightly proud and deeply, horribly, unfathomably ashamed.
If you want the honest truth, this movie is, was, and probably always will be an abysmal idea. There is conceivably a world in which a “9/11 rom-com” actually works for some modern audiences. (Hey, the sex purge kind of worked, right?) But the extraordinarily ambitious narrative deepening that’s attempted in the final minutes here (and in the same year as Nolan’s “Inception,” no less!) land… awkwardly, to say the least. The result is a repertory pick that isn’t nearly as fun in the topical sense as you’d hope.
Still, Pattinson, who was just starting to crack out of his commercial shell at the time, makes the most of lines that I, for whatever reason, know by heart in 2026. Even with Tyler showing objective signs of anger management issues (look, it takes a lot to look like a hot-head standing next to James Bond and the closeted guy from “American Beauty”), he’s a charming and seedy slacker you’re sad to see go. More than anything, the problem lies in the execution — as an absolutely catastrophic event effectively ejects Coulter and Fetters’ main character from his own story and into the abyss of early 2000s political turmoil.
Other films have handled the shocking deaths of romantic leads with more grace — Anne Hathaway riding her bike in front of a certain semi-truck in 2011 comes to mind — even while doing objectively less to ensure that they’re understood. I believe “Remember Me” was made with good intentions. I also believe it is remembered for failing to fulfill those intentions, and that Pattinson’s chemistry with de Ravin is really the only thing that saves it. (Separately, I’m mostly confident this would pair well as a double-feature with “The Drama”? Investigation pending.)
Before writing my response to this week’s After Dark, I learned today would be Wilson’s last at IndieWire. The irony of his final byline being this particular film is not lost on either of us. But with more than three years of friendship and professional history on the record (fun fact: I was his manager once!), I’m confident a September won’t go by that one of us doesn’t text the other, “Remember me?” —Alison Foreman
Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire’s midnight movie club:
