Here Before

A mother who lost her daughter starts believing that her daughter may have come back to life thru the little girl that lives next door with her parents. Throughout their exhange, the girl reminds the mother of things her and her daughter have done together when she was alive in certain places and the mother is becoming more convinced that her daughter has come back from the dead and now living thru her neighbors daughter. The process of the big reveal does drag a bit but the revelation off all things become very clear and in the end without any spoilers, the mother is left devastated and I'll leave it right there. A solid one time (only) watch. Slow but definitely meaningful.

When a couple and their young daughter move in next door, Andrea Risborough, whose own daughter died years before, starts taking an interest in the girl and begins to believe that she may actually be her daughter.

Fascinating drama / thriller centred around motherhood and the loss of child. What holds this together do well is that you're never entirely sure where this is going. Is she just losing it following the loss of her daughter or is there something supernatural going on and why is the girl seemingly equally interested in Risborough? That it gets through all this mystery and comes up with a solid, convincing conclusion is to its great credit. Everyone in it acts very well, but of course Risborough is top of the pops here and gives a delivers a great turn, carefully avoiding endless, over the top melodrama. Definitely worth catching.

Great to see good films being made in Northern Ireland these days. Days of the troubles are gone.

Superb acting and different kinda story. I enjoyed it.

The ending is rushed, needed more room to unravel and breath.

On paper, this should be a good film: a psychological thriller, centred on grief and on the tension between common sense and being desperate to believe in something beyond reality. However, other than some pretty decent acting, the film fails in every other respect.

The atmosphere and suspense doesn't properly build up, it's rather deflated throughout the film (it doesn't even properly pick up in the third act), neither does the psychological portrait of the main heroine. It's supposed to mainly be about her slow descent into grief-fuelled paranoia, but that gets side-tracked by a lack of coherence in every other character's behaviour.

It might have worked if it had been entirely focused on the main heroine's point of view, but instead we jump around following a bunch of characters whose motives and internal worlds are entirely opaque, being given nothing to work with. And then at the very end, where you hope for everything to finally fall into place, the resolution is anticlimactic and not particularly believable either.

Here Before: A young family move in next door to a somewhat older settled couple. The new family have a young daughter Megan (Niamh Doran) who reminds next doors Laura (Andrea Riseborough) of her deceased daughter Josie. Megan remembers events from Josie's past, at first mundane things but it moves on to specific strange memories. Megan recalls being in the graveyard, items in the playground which were removed years before. Laura's husband Brendan (Jonjo O'Neill) ties to get her to accept that Megan is not Josie, he still grieves over the loss but handles it better than Laura. Laura's obsession grows causing Megan's mother Marie (Eileen O'Higgins) to tell her to stay away from Megan. Megan however now claims that she is Josie. This would be a case of Dybbuk rather reincarnation as Megan is the age that Josie would be now. A sense of apprehension builds as the film unfolds, st on the semi-rural outskirts of Belfast the houses back on to a hill which is mist and rain covered much of the time. Indeed the rain is constant in this film adding to the bleak mood. The sound mixing is excellent as you hear trees creak over foreboding music adding to the eeriness of scenes. The intensity of Andrea Riseborough's portrayal of Laura is central to the narrative with great performances from Naimh Dornan and Lewis McAskie as Laura's son Tadgh who clashes with Megan. Maybe the script or direction wobbles a little with the denouement but this is an unsettling psychological thriller. Written and Directed by Stacey Gregg in her directorial debut. 8/10.