I Still See You (2018)

(On Cable TV, November 2019) One of the fundamental writing lessons that they don’t often teach in how-to books is focus. Or, in other words, “calm down, and don’t make it so complicated.”  Writers often spend so much time with their story that it becomes almost a necessity to add fancy adornments to it. To make it even more complex. To add a plot so complicated that no one else can follow it. This is even more crucial in screenwriting, given the necessities to fit everything in a limited amount of time. Focus, screenwriters, focus! Don’t throw everything but the kitchen sink, then add a romance, a murder mystery, a voyage of discovery and a global apocalypse on top of everything. But novelist Daniel Waters didn’t listen and screen writer Jason Fuchs didn’t listen and director Scott Speer didn’t listen in the making of I Still See You, with starts with a future world in which ghosts have some influence over the real world, but then goes on to add romance, grief, conspiracy, murder and self-actualization on top of it. Pick two out of five, maybe. I Still See You doesn’t help its case by inventing a new vocabulary to talk about its ghosts, and then impose a curriculum that requires you to learn about a decade’s worth of future history in order to even make sense of what’s happening. The story becomes even worse once you discover that there’s someone in the protagonist’s entourage that has a significant role in how this world-changing incident happened. At some point, it all becomes too much for too little return. I would be amazed to say this considering that I spent a lot of time in my life enjoying thick science-fiction books about entire future empires, but the problem is that I wanted to enjoy those SF series, whereas I really don’t care about any aspect of I Still See You: it’s dark, dull, painfully less interesting than it imagines itself to be, and doesn’t have anything to keep viewers invested in what it has to say. A great story will spawn hundreds of fanfiction stories to expand upon the world it suggests, but as proved here a bad story will make viewers reluctant to even engage with its core. Goth Bella Thorne could have been interesting … but not in this film. There are plenty of other better YA horror (ish) stories out there to spend any more time even thinking about I Still See You. Go see those instead.  Please, no sequels.