Reawakening + Q&A (15)

A traumatised couple are further tested when a young woman appears claiming to be their long-lost daughter, in Virginia Gilbert’s gripping thriller.

Jared Harris and Juliet Stevenson play John and Mary, a married couple – he’s an electrician, she’s a primary school teacher – whose daughter Clare vanished 10 years previously at the age of 14. For a decade, they have lived in a twilight of suppressed despair and clenched longing, a hibernation of the soul.

On the 10th anniversary of her disappearance, the police talk John and Mary into appearing at another agonised, televised appeal for information – and then a miracle. A tremulous, frightened young woman (Erin Doherty) appears on their doorstep.. She says that she’s Clare and appears to know things that only Clare would know. Or does she? Mary passionately wants to believe and ignores any hint to the contrary; John goes in the opposite emotional direction and is heavy-handed in his sceptical questioning, continuing to haunt a community centre for homeless teens, asking if anyone has seen his daughter.

Reawakening is the kind of grown up, approachable film designed to be talked about afterwards over dinner.