-By Sarah Sluis

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Ally (Emilie de Ravin) and Tyler (Robert Pattinson of Twilight fame), the lead characters in Remember Me, have a sadness not usually seen in NYU students. It’s a quality that endears them to each other. When they meet, each senses the other’s loss, and they develop a romance steeped in a lingering sense of mourning.

Queens-based Ally witnessed her mother’s murder on a subway platform years earlier and, as far as we can tell, hasn’t ridden the subway since. Ally and her father (Chris Cooper) are extremely protective toward each other, and she lives at home while attending NYU. Upper East Sider Tyler is directionless and angry after the suicide of his musician brother, whose profession was roundly criticized by his powerful father (Pierce Brosnan). Tyler hates his father for his neglect of his sister Caroline (Ruby Jerins, a child actor to watch), a misfit kid with an artistic gift.

With the help of Tyler’s roommate Aidan (Tate Ellington), who provides some comic relief, Tyler and Ally spend the summer together in their own insular world. Though they find happiness and companionship in their relationship, they never lose sight of their losses. The night after first sleeping with Ally, Tyler disappears and returns hours later with a bialy. Where was he? At a diner, writing a journal entry to his dead brother to tell him about his budding relationship.

As gloomy as this sounds, the script by Will Fetters, who has since been commissioned to work on the Nicholas Sparks adaptation The Lucky One, avoids turning such moments (and there are many) into maudlin spectacles. The plot favors an elliptical structure that slides over events both between scenes and within them, carrying the audience right from a pre-dinner flirtation to a cut of Tyler wiping the dishes clean. Touching down on these characters’ lives in such an intermittent fashion gives the whole movie an ethereal feel.

Remember Me falters by failing to vary the emotional weight of its events. A scene in which Caroline is bullied at school seems blown out of proportion, with all hands on deck seized by sadness and anger. Perhaps the family’s damaged selves cause them to overreact, but there’s nothing in the movie to encourage this kind of response. Instead, the fallout from the bullying seems just as important, if not more, than what happens next.

Set during the summer before September 11, it’s no great surprise that the movie ends shortly after. Thankfully, director Allen Coulter employs a significant elision, never showing the most ubiquitous news image of that day, the burning Twin Towers. While it’s been nearly a decade since the events of September 11, the screenplay was written years before, leaving us to wonder how this revelation at the end (the timeline is kept deliberately fuzzy) would have felt a few years ago. Thoughtful and a step above the typical romantic drama, Remember Me should surprise Twilight fans with its sensitivity and miasmatic sense of grief, which stays with the viewer even after leaving the theatre.