Reawakening review - a prodigal daughter returns, or does she?

“I’d know her. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Would I know her? Would I?” John (a brilliant Jared Harris, who’s also an executive producer) is always looking for his daughter, who ran away from home ten years ago at the age of 14 and hasn’t been seen since.

Reawakening, Virgina Gilbert’s terrific second feature, is a gripping exploration of loss, grief, loneliness and self-deception. John, a tense-jawed man who looks bleached of colour, is an electrician whose hobby is toy trains; his wife Mary (Juliet Stevenson) is a schoolteacher, working at the same school that Clare, their only child, attended.

You feel the weight of her disappearance everywhere in their suburban London house. Mary sits on Clare’s old bed, murmuring to her lost child about the difficulties of her day at school with Janet, an old battleaxe of a teacher. John watches from the doorway, his devastation written on his face – Harris (pictured below) is wonderful at showing inner turmoil beneath restraint.

Flashbacks don’t reveal much about the family dynamic, but show Clare as a feisty little girl with her dad in his workshop, telling him how boring his trains and lectures about chain reactions are. “You shoulda had a boy,” she says. And in another flashback, we see Clare lying on the sofa, out of it on drugs, her parents desperately trying to wake her up. “You stupid, thoughtless little girl,” shouts John.

He is well known at homeless shelters, where he’s always asking kids if they’ve seen Clare – he and Mary have just done a 10^th anniversary media appeal with the police, with a mock-up of how she’d look as an adult. But there have been no sightings, and a girl from Manchester asks him what kind of father he was anyway. “Did you hit her? Did you fuck her? She doesn’t want to be found.” It’s tragically inconceivable to her and her friends, who’ve known only abuse, that a loving father could be missing his daughter and keeping her face as a screensaver.

Then one day it happens, the longed-for thing. “She’s here,” Mary tells him. “Who’s here?” He doesn’t believe her. But there is a girl (Erin Doherty, pictured above with Juliet Stevenson as Mary) in their kitchen, looking very different, in her abject, furtive posture, from the defiant Clare we’ve heard about, though with similar features and long, straight hair. “I’ve lived with you in my head,” she says.

It’s too much for John – he looks at her in horror and takes off, running down the street, pummelling his head with his fists. “She wept and asked my forgiveness,” says Mary after he returns hours later. She’s come back, she says, whether John likes it or not. And we, the audience, are also in the dark about who she really is. Would she have changed much in ten years? But this is more about the parents' feelings than verisimilitude. There are shades of The Imposter (2012) and The Return of Martin Guerre.

In subsequent meetings – Clare has a flat nearby and a job in a café – he tests her. She answers his questions, but jerkily, hesitantly. “I used to love coming in the shed watching you work,” she says, a dead give-away if ever there was one. And she’s forgotten the name of Janet, the schoolteacher. But then she remembers details about her ninth birthday and the Lion King outing. Could she be for real? Whatever, Mary doesn’t care. It just feels right, she says. “We’ve been blessed, we’ve lived a decade of wanting,” she tells John pleadingly.

Their reactions to this girl are diametrically opposed. Mary is desperate to love and accept; John is angry, more desperate than ever to find out the truth. He meets more runaways and the sadness in their pasts, contrasted to the stable upbringing that Clare apparently knew, is terribly sad. Why did she leave? It’s never spelled out, but perhaps there are no clear answers. What do we really know about our children and their lives? There’s nothing predictable here and the tension never eases, right up until the final, strange resolution.

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