Psychological thriller Reawakening screening with Director Virginia Gilbert Q&A at Chiswick Cinema

Their daughter returns after an absence of ten years – but is it really her?

Reawakening (2024) is only Virginia Gilbert’s second feature film. Shot in 21 days for less than £1 million, she nevertheless managed to attract not only Jared Harris and Juliet Stevenson as lead actors, but Erin Doherty – before her meteoric rise to fame through Adolescence and the Disney + series A Thousand Blows. Oh, and Niamh Cusack and Nicholas Pinnock in cameo roles.

The fabulous cast does her excellent script justice. I found it thoroughly absorbing – moving, suspenseful and thought-provoking in equal measure. I am delighted to be talking to her about it with her at Chiswick Cinema on Sunday (4pm, Sunday 17 May).

Reawakening is about a couple whose daughter ran away from home when she was 14, never to be heard of since. The film opens with the tenth anniversary of her disappearance and a police press conference to jog the public’s memory.

Juliet Stevenson, Jared Harris, Erin Doherty

Juliet Stevenson plays these tortured, emotionally draining roles so well, matched here by Jared Harris’s performance as the stoical, loving and nurturing husband and father, persevering in trying to find their daughter by distributing posters and going to see young people in the local homeless centre to see if anyone has seen her or heard anything about her.

They are destroyed as a couple, though manage to stay together where in real life many couples under this sort of strain end up separating.

They do so by supporting each other emotionally, but they deal with their grief in very different ways – she by sobbing into her pillow, and spending time talking about the minutiae of her life in her job as a teacher to their daughter’s photograph; he by concentrating for hours on end on his model trains in the shed.

Then a girl turns up on their doorstep. Mary, the mother, is completely convinced she is their daughter, skipping round the kitchen making cakes and scones for breakfast, urging her husband not to press her on where she’s been and why she hasn’t been in touch, terrified that she will leave again if they push too hard.

John, the husband, doesn’t believe her. He wants s DNA test. His emotions are put through the wringer as the girl appears to know about their daughter’s life – what they did for her last birthday (a trip to see The Lion King), what she said about it afterwards and even what cake they ate (lemon drizzle – her favourite), but then she doesn’t know details like whether he takes sugar and the name of the teacher who Mary is working with, who taught their daughter, and who she hated.

Her memory had been affected by drugs, ‘Claire’ offers.

The film is a twisty psychological thriller which takes different turns as they find out new information from the police appeal and spend more time with the girl. Their different reactions escalate into a rift as the girl becomes closer to the mother.

It is not conventional either as a thriller or as a drama, and the outcome is unexpected. Like The Drama, it leaves you thinking ‘what would I do?’

Virginia had the idea years ago she told me but put it on the back burner as she was busy with other projects. It was during Covid when production was stopped that she had the time to write it. She did a great deal of research for it and was deeply gratified when the Missing People charity endorsed it for its realism.

Her first choice of actors accepted, on the strength of the script, and Jared Harris also became the Executive Producer, while Virginia wrote, directed and produced it. She was lucky to find a financial backer in Lucette Walters, who in the end stumped up for the whole cost when another pulled out.

Virginia on set

On casting Erin Doherty, she told me:

I had seen her in The Crown [playing Princess Anne] and in a BBC series Chloe – another psychological thriller in which she played this chameleon-like character. I kept telling the promoters:  ‘She’s on the rise’.”

Absolutely she is. When they started filming she had not yet played the psychiatrist in Adolescence, which won her an Emmy award and a Golden Globe. The Netflix drama has also just won Best Limited Series in the Bafta Television Awards.

Nor had she started work on A Thousand Blows, the Victorian drama which aired last year on Disney+, in which she played Mary Carr, the leader of the Forty Elephants, a notorious gang of women robbers, also with Stephen Graham.

Reawakening was released in the autumn of 2024 in 80 cinemas in the UK and Ireland and was released in the States in November.

“I am pleased to say it has punched above its weight”, said Virginia.

The screening is at 4pm on Sunday 17 May, with the Q&A after.

Book tickets: Reawakening – Chiswick Cinema