Reawakening

The London suburb of Harrow may not seem the most obvious setting for a psychological thriller but the area is writer/director Virginia Gilbert’s home patch - and clearly she knows it inside out from the genteel to the less salubrious.

It provides an incongruous backdrop for this examination of a couple’s worst nightmare: the loss of a child who simply disappears and then reappears after almost a decade.

Gilbert is admirably served by the casting of Jared Harris and Juliet Stevenson as the “ordinary” married couple whose relationship is put to the extreme test when the child Claire vanishes. And then they have to confront the return of the girl as a young adult (as played by Erin Doherty with a subtle sense of mystery) with the niggling seeds of doubt that she may not be whom they think, hope and believe her to be.

It’s the sheer commanding presence of the acting triumvirate that grabs the attention with Harris barely able to accept the girl’s return while Stevenson exudes a much more accepting nature. Doherty’s edgy performance sustains the sense of mystery surrounding the character. The conflicting responses to what should have been a welcome homecoming, places the state of the marriage on a knife-edge as each grapples with a highly emotive situation.

The narrative deals profoundly with grief as well as loss which will assuredly resonate with most of us and finally offers notes of hope amid a swirling nail-biting conundrum where nothing is as it seems on the surface.

Gilbert, who came to attention with her debut feature A Long Way from Home (set among the British ex-pat community in France), delivers a tautly written script and a crisp running time. She demonstrates an agile ability to ensure the audience makes the leaps of faith with the characters and teases out the denouement with an assured grasp of the material.

The film leaves you with doubts about precisely where the strands of truth lie which is just as it should be.