It’s already becoming a bit of cliché to say that a film (or book, or show, or album) is Actually About Grief and Trauma, and I’d imagine this will only get worse in the months and even years to come. But Stacey Gregg’s dramatic thriller “Here Before,” which is about a woman who comes to believe that the new neighbors’ daughter is the reincarnation of her own lost young one, is actually about grief and trauma, and handles those topics with delicacy and grace. And then it’s shocking and creepy, on top of that.
READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2021
Laura (Andrea Riseborough) and Brendon (Martin McCann) lost their daughter Josie in a car accident, and those abstract images open the picture. (Has a single film in movie history opened with a family drive, at night, in the rain, that didn’t turn into a tragedy?) They got through it, somehow, and had a son, and lived their lives, and then a new family moves in next door, and Laura meets Megan (Niamh Dornan), their “wee girl.” A connection forms, one of those inexplicable but undeniable things – well, maybe there’s an explanation for it. “The little girl puts me in mind of Josie, that’s all,” Laura tells Brendon, and he’s a little worried.
He should be. This little girl keeps saying these strange things and seems to know things she shouldn’t know about Josie and Laura and Brendon and their family. “Have you been here before, Megan?” Laura asks, cautiously, as she begins reading books about reincarnation and asking leading questions. Her husband presses her: “We all miss Josie. But Megan is not Josie.”
READ MORE: The 25 Best Films Of 2020
“How do you know?” Laura replies. “How can you be sure?”
The picture and its protagonist are both well aware of how cuckoo-bananas this all seems (“I understand that I sound crazy, cause I can hear myself,” Laura says). But is it, really? Anyone who has lost someone they love knows that moment, that desperate, pleading moment, of falling to their knees and hoping and praying that the one who’s gone forever will come back. So what if they did? What would you say? How would you act? What would it take to convince you?
Andrea Riseborough, who is somehow still not a giant star, can do just about anything. Still, she’s especially good at playing these women who are smiling and smiling and barely keeping it together. In the hands of a lesser actor, this could be camp, or worse; but it’s heavy Greek tragedy in hers. The supporting cast is skilled as well, especially Eileen O’Higgins (from “Brooklyn”) as Megan’s mother, who tries her best to be kind and ingratiating, and then realizes that’s not going to work. She and Riseborough share a front porch scene that turns from polite requests to hisses and snarls, and the rhythms of that scene, the preciseness with which it goes south, is sort of astonishing.
But “Here Before” is filled with those little moments of offhand truth. Gregg, who wrote and directed, has mostly written for television, and while this is her feature directorial debut, she’s a born filmmaker. She creates the tension between these families from their first shared scene, in the unspoken ways they regard each other (and the assumptions that they’ll articulate when the inevitable conflict comes), and she builds that uneasiness often with merely the composition of her frames, or the timing of the reactions. She can wield a cut, or a piece of music, with an unnerving force, and she makes a meal out of the slow, steady accumulation of dread and fear in the film’s back half. It works, and any filmmaker who can do that, while simultaneously threading in the potent grief and trauma material, should get to do whatever the hell they want as an encore. [A]
You can follow along with the rest of our 2021 SXSW coverage here.