Andrea Riseborough may be our greatest under-appreciated actress working today. Delivering standout turns in indie favorites like Mandy, Possessor, and Birdman as well as leading Amazon’s excellent crime drama ZeroZeroZero, Riseborough has slowly proven herself a transfixing chameleon presence. A la the great Tilda Swinton, with whom she shares vampiric lily white skin and sharp angular features, Riseborough creeps into the skin of her roles, the real persona rarely peeking through.
In Here Before, Stacey Gregg’s unnerving domestic psychological thriller, Riseborough shines as bright as ever executing a pitch-perfect balancing act as a grieving mother Laura. When new next-door neighbors moves in, Laura is pulled towards young Megan (Niamh Dornan) who not only physically resembles her deceased daughter Josie but seems to recall things about Josie’s life. As Laura and Megan develop an increasingly close relationship, much to the chagrin of husband Brendan (Jonjo O’Neill) and son Tadhg (Lewis McAskie), Laura’s suspicion that Megan may in fact be her dead daughter reincarnate grows.
From a screenwriting perspective, Gregg wants to keep viewers off-balance for as much of Here Before as she can and she does a great job of keeping us on our toes, reorienting our suspicions with each new twisty reveal, knotting the known and unknown into a complex pretzel wherein it’s a challenge to make heads or tails of who is who and what is what. 
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Her flirtation with the supernatural adds a lingering creepy element to the equation, an element exacerbated by Adam Janota Bzowski’s gnawing score and Chloë Thomson’s mysterious cinematography. Though I’m not fully convinced everything entirely adds up, this is smart, effective storytelling regardless that shows a lot of promise for Gregg as a filmmaker.
But at its heart, Here Before is a story about grief and the complicated process of turning a life turned inside out right again and the confusion, sorrow, and misplaced hope that plays throughout Gregg’s feature is meant to mimic Laura’s psyche as she embarks down the long highway of recovering from loss. There’s splashes of Pet Sematary and Rabbit Hole, a blend of hard psychological thriller and grief-stricken character study, but Here Before largely stands on its own merits, attempting to make sense of the grounded horror that is the loss of a child in its own way. Strap in.
CONCLUSION: Andrea Riseborough mic drops another outstanding performance in Stacey Gregg’s remarkably unnerving ‘Here Before’, an Irish domestic psychological thriller about a mother convinced that her deceased daughter has returned in the form of her wee new neighbor.
B+
For all our coverage of SXSW 2021, click here.
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By: Matt Oakes
Started blogging about film in college when the university paper wouldn’t have him. Dislikes your consensus film Twitter favorites. Devotee of horror movies that make him die a little inside. Catches films at festivals when he can. Proud SFCS and OFCS member and Tomatometer-approved critic. Editor-in-chief of Silver Screen Riot.
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