I’m not generally a fan of films that spell everything out, and if you’ve been reading this thing for awhile that’s pretty apparent. Horror thrives on mystery, on the ambiguous, on the unexplained. But it’s a balance - even if the overall feeling of a film is disorienting or dreamlike, there should still be some sort of reckoning. That is, the viewer should be able to more or less make sense of what they’ve just watched, even if that sense arrives very late in the film, otherwise horror is replaced with confusion. You can get away with a lot if you bring everything together in the end.
So this is probably my biggest problem with Reunion. It has a lot going for it - it’s a modern riff on traditional gothic horror, impressionistic, uneasy, and cryptic. But, ultimately, it might be a little too cryptic for its own good.
We open on an academic lecture - we don’t see the speaker, it’s just a voice over a slide show, rapid-fire images of medieval illustrations of reproduction and birth. The unseen lecturer is talking about the transition from medieval ideas of alchemy to modern conceptions of science, and how in essence what we now know as biology and chemistry have their roots in black magic. A subject in which the lecturer has a personal interest, though there’s no time to get into that today.
The lecturer is Ellie. She’s working on a book about this very subject, but she’s taken some time away to travel back to her childhood home. Her father, Jack, suffers from advanced dementia, feeble and wheelchair-bound, and Ivy, her mother, is preparing to sell the house. Ellie’s there to help, though Ivy seems more concerned with Ellie’s health. Ellie’s pregnant, and Ivy doesn’t want her exerting herself. There’s some suggestion that it’s been a difficult pregnancy. Ivy tells Ellie how happy she is that she left her abusive fiancée. There’s tension between them. You get the sense that there are a lot of things that are going unsaid. Ivy really doesn’t want to talk about Cara, Ellie’s adoptive sister, who died a long time ago.
So why does Ellie keep seeing her?
Structurally, it’s a movie that starts off with little hints that things aren’t what they appear, and as the film goes on, more and more is revealed through flashbacks that add a little more context with each iteration, leading to a walloping reveal at the end. And at its heart, it owes a lot to traditional gothic horror - you’ve got a big, stately house full of family secrets and mysterious apparitions, and though Ellie isn’t exactly an ingenue, her mother is certainly a forbidding figure throughout. It’s a lot less stylized and melodramatic than, say,
Stoker, but it treads some of the same ground. Even if the characters here feel more like actual people, there’s a lot lurking under the surface, and it gets pretty fucking weird. You’ve got a mother who starts the film as a little controlling, but the longer you spend in the film the more her cruelty and manipulation, her gaslighting, becomes readily apparent. Ivy is desperately trying to cover up something that happened years and years ago, and Ellie is a daughter who’s had to struggle for a sense of normalcy most of her life as a result, burying herself in arcane academic subjects. Their story is told in flashbacks and nightmares, repeated and recontextualized motifs throughout, progressing and giving us a little more context every time in a way that conveys the sense that memories are being recovered, that things long repressed are coming back to the surface. Objects and images keep coming up again and again, like they do in dreams, heavy with significance even when you aren’t sure what the significance actually is.
This sense of dream logic extends to how the story is told as well. The dialogue is terse, with lots of oblique exchanges and little asides - blink-and-you-miss-it moments that make you think “what did she just say?” The film takes place almost entirely inside the house, all dark wood and stained glass, shafts of sunlight spilling onto antiques and stacks of boxes. There are nightmare sequences that weave in and out of the narrative alongside the flashbacks, so it isn’t always clear how much of what we’re seeing actually happened or is actually happening and how much is metaphor, and the action is punctuated by interludes of a sort - slideshows like the one that opens the film, slow-motion close-ups of cellular reproduction, blood flow, a feeling of the body as universe. The end result is almost as much tone poem as it is gothic horror, something that you don’t so much think about as feel while you watch it, the details blurring into a wash. As the film goes on, things get more and more bizarre, the lecture voicovers spiral into ranting, Ivy’s behavior likewise totters toward madness, and just when you think you have a handle on what this family’s horrible secret actually is, there’s something else that’s been foreshadowed all along, but not so much that it feels obvious when it becomes clear.
But in some ways, the things that give this film a very specific and uneasy atmosphere are things that work against it as well. The problem is that there’s a lot going on and it’s all presented so cursorily and briefly and in the margins that it’s hard to really get a fix on what the story is, like what the specific through-line is. It seems like it’s about Ellie’s attempts to resolve a childhood trauma, with her own mental health in a precarious condition, and there are ghost-story elements that presumably emerge from that. However, because we don’t really get a firm grounding in “reality” to start, the revelations we get in the last act maybe don’t quite hit as hard as they could, and the final revelation at the climax, which should be a game-changer, feels a little too confusing to have the impact it should, because it’s difficult to tell if it’s something that diegetically happened or if it’s another layer of metaphor, a more dramatically nightmarish expression of Ellie’s trauma. It’s still well-made, well-written and well-acted, and though it does take awhile to get there, it does get really unsettling in ways natural and supernatural by the final act. But if you’re going to be cryptic, then the pieces all need to fall into place in a way that makes all of the prior weirdness clear. There needs to be a reckoning, some kind of resolution, and this film seems reluctant to commit one way or another. It doesn’t ruin it, but it does take some of the sting out of it.
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