Laura (Andrea Riseborough) and her husband Brendan (Jonjo O'Neill) have new neighbours, just moved in next door, a married couple with a little girl. Laura used to have a little girl herself, but fate intervened and she died young in a car crash, a loss her mother is still struggling to come to terms with. When she sees the daughter next door, Megan (Niamh Dornan) it revives all sorts of feelings in her, and though she has a fourteen-year-old son, Tadgh (Lewis McAskie) she continues to feel as if there is something missing in her life. So when Megan is hanging around outside school, Laura is moved to give her a lift home...
Here Before was not a horror movie, but with a few tweaks it could have easily become one. For quite some time it comes across as a psychological drama, yet another work from the twenty-twenties to deal with grief and the toll it can take, a trend that was becoming one of the overarching themes of cinema for this century, never mind this decade. That was understandable with a pandemic on the go, but the sheer amount of bereavement on the screen suggested there was something needing to be expressed across the world, and the film and entertainment industries were stepping in as impromptu counsellors.
The plot here resembled Jonathan Glazer's drama Birth, where Nicole Kidman came to be convinced a young boy of her acquaintance was her reincarnated husband, though debuting writer and director Stacey Gregg had the benefit of a proper ending for her story. Albeit one that not everyone was going to get along with, for such a low key and sinister piece it tipped over into melodrama in the latter stages, but that was fair enough as there was a sense that something needed to break the mood and justify the slow burn of tension that had been playing out over so many scenes of Laura scheming to possibly claim Megan for herself.
Indeed, it becomes almost a running joke that every five minutes Laura will be minding her own business and then is shocked by the little girl popping up to surprise her, a surprise that is a mixture of pleasant and unsettled. That this happens when Laura least expects it, yet feeds into her magical thinking that something from beyond this vale of tears has brought her daughter back to her, was a neat recreation of the kind of confirmation bias that occurs when grief takes hold and refuses to let go, as you see signs of the deceased everywhere you look, since they have been preying on your mind so intensely. Gregg kept this uneasy mood balanced between our scepticism and our wishing the story to move forward in a suspenseful fashion.
There was a lot of the camera gradually zooming in on details that we may or may not regard as significant, or tight closeups on shots like feet or hands to set us on edge. The husbands in this are at a loss to know what to do, and Laura and Brendan actually break up at one point as their marriage endures a crisis and relations between the next-door neighbours reach an impasse, often with angry words exchanged. Tadgh is suffering too, lashing out, but Megan glides above it all, dropping hints that she may not be entirely of this Earth, though cynics may not take her at face value. Perhaps Here Before was a tale for cynics, as it does not resolve itself in a manner that pays off its previous mystery, turning out to be solving a different mystery instead. If you liked that kind of twist, you would find this agreeable, if not, you could accept Riseborough's nervy performance was worth staying with to see where it took her. Music by Adam Janota Bzowski.
[Here Before opens in select cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday 18th February 2022.]
