After premiering at the Dublin Film Festival earlier this year, Virginia Gilbert’s drama Reawakening, which the director also wrote, screened at the Dinard British and Irish Film Festival, in the non-competitive “Other People’s Lives” section. The film was also released in UK and Irish theatres on 13 September.

John (Jared Harris) and Mary (Juliet Stevenson) are a middle-aged couple living in Manchester and trying to carry on with their lives despite the disappearance, ten years ago, of their then 14-year-old daughter Clare. Gilbert focuses our attention on John, an electrician who has just started returning to work after dealing with this tragedy and helping his wife, whom he often catches talking to their absent daughter in the child’s bedroom. The ever-captivating Harris manages to imbue his character with a depth of feeling that isn’t strongly present in the script besides a few short flashbacks to fights that John had with Clare years ago. The actor’s vulnerability, and his capacity to seem at once avoidant and committed to finding his daughter, also hints at a more complicated picture of fatherhood, one riddled with guilt, confusion and fear, even though the script remains largely on the surface and Gilbert’s direction lacks inspiration.

After the couple appears in the media once again on the ten-year anniversary of Clare’s disappearance, Mary one day arrives home to find a young woman there claiming to be their long-lost daughter. Gilbert rightly accentuates the thrill paired with terror that John goes through as he is about to see his child again, worried that he won’t recognise her but also unsure of what the best reaction would be. Finally, he sees her but believes the woman to be a charlatan, and the film almost turns into a detective story as John seeks to identify this woman and discover the truth, while Mary holds on to her relief and bonds with her.

The exact facts of the matter aren’t all that compelling, and some narrative developments are less than surprising, but more importantly, Gilbert doesn’t fully exploit the moral and emotional quandary that John and Mary are put in, as if the filmmaker were too nervous to get her hands dirty and have her characters be truly torn apart by this impossible situation. It is only later on that Stevenson, who also brings some much-needed ambiguity to her rather one-dimensional character, finally unveils the film’s emotional centre, yet that moment comes too late and isn’t executed with the control or ambition it needed in order to be gripping.

Reawakening was produced by the UK’s Rustle Up Productions. Its world sales are handled by WestEnd Films, and it is distributed in the UK and Ireland by Signature Entertainment.