Here Before

If you read the synopsis, you know what this is about. There is a twist here but i didn't like it, it came out of nowhere. Therefore, i didn't like the ending.

Up until the twist, it's watchable but still slow & dragging. And for a 83 minutes movie, this doesn't look good.

It is not a bad movie, the actors are good, and maybe some people will like the ending. If you are in the mood for a slow mystery/drama (With emphasis on "drama"), maybe you will like it more than me.

On paper, this should be a good film: a psychological thriller, centred on grief and on the tension between common sense and being desperate to believe in something beyond reality. However, other than some pretty decent acting, the film fails in every other respect.

The atmosphere and suspense doesn't properly build up, it's rather deflated throughout the film (it doesn't even properly pick up in the third act), neither does the psychological portrait of the main heroine. It's supposed to mainly be about her slow descent into grief-fuelled paranoia, but that gets side-tracked by a lack of coherence in every other character's behaviour.

It might have worked if it had been entirely focused on the main heroine's point of view, but instead we jump around following a bunch of characters whose motives and internal worlds are entirely opaque, being given nothing to work with. And then at the very end, where you hope for everything to finally fall into place, the resolution is anticlimactic and not particularly believable either.

A mother who lost her daughter starts believing that her daughter may have come back to life thru the little girl that lives next door with her parents. Throughout their exhange, the girl reminds the mother of things her and her daughter have done together when she was alive in certain places and the mother is becoming more convinced that her daughter has come back from the dead and now living thru her neighbors daughter. The process of the big reveal does drag a bit but the revelation off all things become very clear and in the end without any spoilers, the mother is left devastated and I'll leave it right there. A solid one time (only) watch. Slow but definitely meaningful.

Great to see good films being made in Northern Ireland these days. Days of the troubles are gone.

Superb acting and different kinda story. I enjoyed it.

The ending is rushed, needed more room to unravel and breath.

The acting, the mood, the cinematography... is superb. There is not much going on to be honest, but I actually loved the first 2/3 because the small details were clever, and tensions felt very real. I don't mind a slow burn when it's so well executed. For me, the" twist" ending was the let down. The movie is rather slow, and it way too much to unpack in the last 15 minutes, felt rushed and hard to swallow. The more I think about the ending, the more it really doesn't make much sense, and contrasts a lot with the rest of the movie that feels mature and believable. Still, reminds me a bit of "Birth" with Nicole Kidman... Not a great movie, but it kind of sticks with you.