Rating: B
Dir: Virginia Gilbert
Star: Jared Harris, Juliet Stevenson, Erin Doherty, Niamh Cusack
With hindsight, it might have been a mistake watching this on Christmas Eve – before the traditional and required viewing of Die Hard, naturally. It’s not exactly the sort of thing to get you in the festive mood. Described as a “psychological thriller”, it’s really more of a psychological drama. If you go in expecting thrills, you’ll be disappointed. Drama? Plenty, and of a very high quality, because Harris might be the best pure acting performance I’ve seen this year. He plays John Reed: a decade ago, his fourteen-year-old daughter Clare ran away, and has not been seen since. He and wife Mary (Stevenson) have largely put their life on hold. Clare’s bedroom is as she left it, and her parents agonize over their role in the disappearance.
It’s a horrible, plausible glimpse into a situation I wouldn’t wish on anyone, let alone decent people like John and Mary. It’s a case where not knowing is clearly the worst thing, eating away at them from the inside. On the tenth anniversary, they and the police make an appeal for new information (top), more out of duty than hope. But John comes home from his job as an electrician, to find a beaming Mary telling him that Clare (Doherty) has returned. There’s just one problem: John refuses to believe it’s really his daughter, even though she seems to know details about Clare’s life, that only she could possibly know. Mary, however, is absolutely convinced a miracle has happened.
Obviously, there are only two ways the rest of the film can play out. Either the young woman is Clare, or it is not. Whichever way it breaks, is going to destroy somebody, and trigger questions with no easy answers. If it is Clare, where has she been for the past decade? If it isn’t, what is the cuckoo trying to do? [Contemplating the latter possibility, I was reminded of documentary The Imposter, which is highly recommended] I found myself torn between these two outcomes, because I wanted what was best for John and Mary, but found it hard to figure out which option would be… Well, “best” is a stretch; least destructive is probably closer to the truth.
Harris is as brilliant here as he was in Chernobyl, and Gilbert does the smart thing, often simply pointing the camera at him and letting the actor do his thing. There’s one shot in particular, where a character delivers a monologue off-screen, and the camera focuses intently on John, for what seems like an eternity. It slowly zooms in, capturing every nuance of his reaction to what he’s being told. Simple film-making, and remarkably effective. The final resolution is somewhat ambivalent, yet the main question has been answered, and it feels entirely appropriate. Denial, it seems, is not just a river in Egypt – there are times when it may simply be the best solution for everyone, in differing ways.
[The film is available on demand now, from Level 33 Entertainment]