Here Before review – reincarnation thriller is unnerving and unoriginal

Never have four words, spoken by such an unassuming, sweet little girl, sounded so menacing: “I've been here before.” She says them in a playground. Then, a graveyard. They’re repeated throughout Stacey Gregg’s debut feature, fittingly titled Here Before, as a paranormal incantation – a reminder that things are not all they seem in this ostensibly normal suburban street.

Megan (newcomer Niamh Dornan), a sweet young girl of around ten, is the source of the film’s mystery. At least that's the case for Laura (Andrea Riseborough), who lives next door. While Laura is happy with her husband and son, the family still feel the chasm left behind from the death of daughter Josie some years prior. As Laura and Megan’s interactions become increasingly charged with an aura of unease and mystery, the grieving mother soon begins to suspect that this little girl is the reincarnation of her departed child.

Now, you may be thinking: doesn’t this all sound remarkably similar to a certain 2004 masterpiece starring Nicole Kidman, in which a child claims he is the reincarnation of her dead husband? You’d be right to cast your mind to Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, though Gregg’s take is far more attuned to the limits and durabilities of maternal devotion. Andrea Riseborough, with her glassy eyes and dilated pupils, is excellent as a woman understandably sucked into a grief-stricken fantasy. She elevates the at-times derivative plot with a stillness and anguish, a commanding presence that doesn’t need to scream and shout to be heard. In a nifty bit of casting, her and Dornan look alarmingly alike, with large, worrisome eyes concealing a cryptic inner torment.

While proceedings unfurl in a fairly standard manner for the majority of the film, a scene where Laura is in purgatory between her waking life and nightmares is constructed to chilling effect. Never has a ketchup smiley-face been so menacing, nor a shot of a girl looking innocently out of a bedroom window. Indeed, the film uses its visual language to reflect how houses are liminal spaces of grief, in the same way that the horror genre uses haunted houses (all horror films are about grief these days, didn’t you know?).

Adam Janota Bzowski’s score is especially good, layering a real menace onto tropes that work every time (sweet kids doing freaky stuff, etc). But all in all, it’s a shame that the film feels the need to tie things up so neatly, explaining to the audience exactly why characters have been behaving the way they have. Some of these types of psychological thriller wind up more effective when they leave things a little ambiguous, part of the creepiness itself being its mystery. And while the characters themselves are experiencing an uncanny déjà vu, so are the audience, who may find that they can’t quite shake the feeling they’ve seen all this before.

Here Before is released in UK cinemas on 18 February.