REUNION | FILM REVIEW
Dir: Jake Mahaffy (15, 95 mins)
A New Zealand-set horror that creeps and crawls around its ‘haunted’ house, Reunion is disquieting and nightmarish, if sometimes clunky. Ellie, played by Emma Draper, returns to her grandparents’ house and childhood home while pregnant and escaping an abusive relationship, only to find her estranged parents already there. Julia Ormond is her fussy mother Ivy, controlling and going through the nicknacks and clutter of the family home whilst also tending to her husband, played by John Bach, now in the final throes of dementia.
The mother-daughter relationship is strained and tense, and the longer Ellie spends in the house the more frequent disturbing visions of the past and potential future become. Cardboard boxes breathe, strange magickal discoveries are made and Ellie spots her half-sister Cara in the house, who died when they were young. As the film unpicks what the family setup really is, Mahaffy’s slow-burn direction rachets up into an alarming finale.
Riddled with family baggage, guilt, fear of pregnancy and the unborn, insanity and death, Reunion has plenty of bleak moments. A shattered vase holds the key as the circumstances behind Cara’s death come into shady focus amidst Ormond and Draper’s cool anger. The film has a dreamlike quality, creating questions about Draper’s sanity; hideous homunculus prosthetics add to the strangeness before a full-on finale in this family house of horror. There’s more than just a strained parent-child dynamic at play here.
Draper and Ormond are good, if occasionally given rather expository dialogue amidst the murk, both of them unafraid of being unlikeable. Ormond’s mother is trying to pack the horrors of the past away in literal boxes, whilst daughter Draper is looking for answers – opening up what has been kept from her, memories that she has suppressed. A well shot, unsettling slow burner with plenty of psychological meat to chew on.
Released Mon 22 Mar on VOD
words KEIRON SELF