Reawakening

When we first meet John and Mary (Jared Harris and Juliet Stevenson, respectively), they are perched at a queasy crossroads: past the point of hope, but unable to grieve. Their teenage daughter Clare went missing a decade prior, and in Harris and Stevenson’s weary faces one sees that frantic desperation has long faded into denial. If their daughter is never to return, it’s been mutually agreed upon that they ignore this fact, their home a bare shrine to a lost past and untroubled by the arrival of any future. When a tear in this fabric finally arrives in the form of a mystery woman claiming to be the grown Clare (Erin Doherty), the two are suddenly set on diverging paths.

For her part, Mary seizes onto their new houseguest with the feverish desperation of renewed hope, lavishing “Clare” with affection and fiercely attacking any scepticism. John does the same, only his conviction is that this interloper must know where the real Clare is and will finally offer an answer. What ensues works in large part because Doherty provides such a memorably unsettling blank canvas for this spare drama to orbit. Her every gesture suggests someone ill at ease in ill-fitting skin, but eagerly striving to seem the part in spite of this. No spoken word seems to come to her without the greatest effort, save for repeated, increasingly ominous entreaties for forgiveness. The hovering question of where her genuine trauma begins and her calculated evasiveness ends powers so much of Reawakening’s subtle psychological horror, that it’s a shame when the film’s final third dispels much of the mystery.

Virginia Gilbert’s feature would make for an intriguing double bill with Christina Choe’s Nancy, another eerie drama starring Andrea Riseborough as a woman convinced she may be the missing child of a grieving couple played by J Smith Cameron and Steve Buscemi. In adopting the vantage of this unsettling imposter, the film posed provocative questions regarding the co-dependency that may form between a couple longing for a lost child and a woman longing for an identity, irrespective of what was fact and what was mere force of will.

Writer-director Gilbert is occupied with similar questions, and as with the prior film, Reawakening seems to know that the real mystery is not in the new arrival’s identity. For all the ambiguity surrounding the revenant Clare, Gilbert’s true interest lies in the differing ways the bereaved-yet-not-bereaved parents respond to her presence. In the absence of knowledge, what do they choose to believe, and in what way do their beliefs benefit them? Come the end, Reawakening proffers a definitive explanation by way of an expository speech, and it rings false. A tidy diagnosis is effectively provided for the behaviour of all the drama’s principal players, when few of the questions the story preceding it has raised ought to come with easy answers. The more concrete information we have, the smaller the drama of Reawakening actually seems. Ultimately, this modest but deeply felt feature is strongest when on uncertain ground. 

Thomas Messner

Reawakening is released nationwide on 13^th September 2024.

Watch the trailer for Reawakening here: