Displaying items by tag: Emma Draper

REUNION

New Zealand, 2020, 95 minutes, Colour.

Julia Ormond, Emma Draper, Ava Keane, Gina Lafferty, John Bach, Cohen Holloway.

Directed by Matt Maffahy.

It is important to note that only dedicated film watchers may persevere with Reunion until the end. Most audiences have found the film difficult to follow, very slow in its pace, tantalising sometimes with themes, and the temptation to give up.

This is a New Zealand production with an American director, and a British lead actress, Julia Ormond. The cinematography is powerful, most of the action confined to the interiors of a house, the main room is full of all kinds of furniture and ornaments, a more sinister upstairs, some ventures outside the house. It is significant that the film is impressive to look at, and an atmospheric score.

The opening credits are very tantalising, all kinds of cards, slides, ancient manuscripts indicating conjoined foetus in the womb, other aspects of closeness of brothers and sisters, and this theme continuing at times in the dialogue throughout the film, especially in the research of the daughter, estranged from her mother, now pregnant and returning home.

On the one hand, the mother, Julia Ormond, seems solicitous for her daughter, the daughter with ambiguous responses, on the one hand and some pressurised emotional violence on the other.

For those who persevere with the film, there is the grandfather, elderly and confined in the house. There are many flashbacks, the emergence in the story that there are two sisters, bonds, rivalries, issues of parental fidelity and infidelity, and all the time the mental and physical state of the mother, discipline, beatings, verbal pressure – and the relationship between the two sisters trying to cope.

As with this kind of atmospheric story and characterisation, it builds up to the revelation of secrets within the history of the family, psychological and physical horror, the challenge to an audience to persevere with exploring the deep secrets and horror this family, especially mother and daughter.