Dana reviews the new horror film, Reunion.
Reunion, a film
by Shawn Chou, pulls no punches at its outset – it reads like a
made-for-television horror drama, and it sets itself up with limited
imagination, but a lot of heart. It weaves a converging narrative as gracefully
as its genre allows, and while it won’t stand out as great cinema, it tries to
make up for its faults with a pair of central characters in a relationship
endearing enough to care about. While it doesn’t quite accomplish what it
appears to set out to do, it does give its audience a moderately interesting
ride.
Brad Norton (Jack Turner), once a rock musician at the
height of popularity, seems to have it all together despite a career nosedive;
he and his lovely girlfriend, Carly (Sarah Schreiber), are seen picnicking in
an idyllic scene when a spilled bottle of champagne awakens voices of the
demons in his past. The couple are beginning a new life in a beautiful new
place, but unpacking boxes for a new beginning will mean uncovering a
collection of memories from previous lives – often other beginnings, some with abrupt
and messy ends.
The spiral unwinds, at first, from Carly’s point of view
as she tends to mental patients in a hospital full of strangely dispassionate
and negligent staff. There are underlying tones of sexual harassment and
inappropriateness which the film seems to want to explore further than it does;
many of the characters serve as outright caricatures to offset the gentle
integrity of Carly and paint her as a reasonable protagonist. It is hardly
subtle writing, but it does what it’s meant to: She is clearly the only really
competent and caring person working with the patients, and we need to see her
as altruistic and selfless to read her involvement in the lives of difficult
patient Mia, who only seems to respond well to her – and, ultimately, Brad, who loves her but has
buried secrets which manifest in nightmarish flashbacks. But Carly serves
mainly as a catalyst for the tripping of the plot, and she doesn’t get the
story she deserves.
When we are first introduced to her, Mia (Maria Olsen)
appears to be a typical near-catatonic schizophrenic, sullenly attempting to
play a solo game of ‘Connect Four’. The image we see of her doesn’t quite match
up with the terrifying, gory drawings found in her file, or in the obsessive
fixation she has on magazine clippings featuring Brad Norton and his music
career; she is treated like a willful child, and at first, she holds the
illusion of control with steady hands. Genuinely compassionate, Carly is
determined to treat her with kindness and a respect fueled by an actual desire
to help the woman – an attitude her co-workers rebuff as naïve and unwise.
Beneath the veneer of her disease, there is a crouching beast concealed in a
vortex of dark voices and inhuman thought driven by delusion and misplaced rage.
There is a Friedrich
Nietzsche quote: “There is always some madness
in love, but there is always some reason in madness “ which opens the film, and if there is an
underlying theme which ties the various notions of what love and family are –
and what these can do to a person when they are not what they should be – it is
stated nowhere more succinctly; Reunion
wants to tell the story of the madness inherent in love and the barriers it
both breaks and creates. Were it not so
overly dependent upon the clichés inherent in the tropes it espouses, it might actually
have succeeded – but because it feels it has to follow the formula, it falls
short of the mark. I found myself throughout most of the film more focused on
the implausibility of the whole situation rather than engaging with the fate of
the characters, which detracts from the experience as a whole, disappointingly canceling
out the careful cinematography and thoughtful use of symbolism in several
crucial scenes.
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