Director – Virginia Gilbert – 2024 – UK – Cert. 15 – 90m
***
When a couple’s daughter returns after a decade’s long absence, the husband starts to suspect she is not really their daughter – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 13th
It’s been ten years since their daughter Clare left home at 14. Not a day has gone by for her parents John (Jared Harris) and Mary (Juliet Stevenson) when they haven’t thought about her. The couple are in touch with the police and give periodic press conferences which have, so far, yielded nothing in the way of results.
Yet John, a self-employed electrician, has never given up hope. On the streets, he looks out for his daughter in the hope that he might one day see her again. And then, one day, he sees her sitting at then getting up from a table outside a café. He runs towards her, nearly getting hit by a car in the process, then follows her only to lose her down a turning.
Every morning at the primary school where she teaches, his wife Mary re-pins the poster of their missing daughter over the top of other bits of posters pinned on top of it to ensure that it can be clearly seen. John phones her regularly throughout the day to check she is ok.
Then, one afternoon, he can’t get hold of her. Returning home, he finds her ecstatic. Their daughter Clare (Erin Doherty from Firebrand, Karim Ainouz, 2023) has returned. But Mary won’t let him ask any difficult or searching questions. She is overjoyed to have Clare back. However, John is beset with doubts: is she really their daughter? What happened to her? Why has she suddenly come back?
This promising, primal premise slowly builds to the pivotal scene which reveals whether she is or is not the daughter, which occurs maybe five minutes towards the end. Before then, with the focus on the husband and his dilemma, you wonder if you’re watching a family living a lie, since there’s a doubt whether Clare really is Clare.
Do the couple want their daughter back so badly that they will accept anyone, even if it’s not her. From time to time, John visits a shelter for runaways in the hope that one of them may have seen his daughter. One of the people he questions, a black girl, treats him strangely. Is there something she knows that she isn’t telling him?
Before we reach the pivotal scene, the movie seems to take too long, and after it occurs there are numerous unanswered questions with which the film, having only five minutes left to run, can’t even begin to get to grips. The journey to this scene takes far too long (the whole thing could probably be cut to a really gripping 45 or so minutes).
And it leaves unanswered key questions like, if this couple have lost their daughter and a stranger who might be her starts living with them, wouldn’t someone notice and call the police to report the fact?
Jared Harris is suitably pent-up as the husband who can’t quite believe the couple’s apparent good fortune, although Juliet Stevenson seems far too pleasant and fawning over the returned daughter. Occasionally, her mask comes off, and she turns incredibly savage, which feels far more credible for a woman in her character’s situation.
Erin Doherty conjures an almost ghostlike presence as the daughter – I’d love to be able to report that she’s like Kim Novak at the end of Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), but, sadly, neither she nor the film is in anything like the same league here, although in other hands either or both might well have been.
There are memorable bit parts: Nicolas Pinnock is the conscientious cop assigned the couple’s case, Niamh Cusack is the supportive administrator of the shelter for runaways, and Scarlett Bobbi is the hostile woman his daughter’s age who appears to know a great deal more than she lets on, arguably the strongest performance here.
It’s such a promising idea that you wish Gilbert had been pushed to write further drafts of her script, or perhaps collaborate with another writer to help her push it further. The result is unsatisfying rather than great. Which is a shame, because you sense this screenplay had considerable potential had it been developed a lot further before shooting.
Reawakening is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 13th.
Trailer: