Alan in Belfast: Reawakening – the return of a prodigal daughter poses more questions than it answers (Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 13 September)

Clare Reed walked out of her family home aged 14, never to return. For ten years, Mary and John have lived with her absence, one throwing themselves into work as a classroom assistant looking after other people’s children, the other working as an electrician by day while combing homeless centres by night to try to trace anyone who might recognise the girl in the last picture he had of his daughter. Mary comes home one day to find a woman sitting on the wall outside their house. John has so many questions, but good answers aren’t forthcoming.

Reawakening is a character study of two parents and a young woman. It’s about a mother whose need to love a child makes her reluctant to confront the truth staring her in the face. How a young person longs to live in the safety of a family home. How a father struggles to balance his desire for truth and explanation with what’s best for his wife.

Erin Doherty is trapped in the middle of this fractured domesticity, playing a young woman who has been lied to, abused, and now wants to reconstruct her life. John (played by Jared Harris) lashes out with incredible outbursts of rage. Yet later in the film, the camera lingers on his emotionally fraught face as he silently listens to a revelatory account of Clare’s life. Juliet Stevenson offers a multi-layered portrayal of a mother whose grief is mixed with guilt and longing. She’s bubbly and broken, all at the same time.

Together these parents have to deal with the consequences of their action and inaction, in the past and going forward. Maybe there’s an unorthodox way of rationalising what’s now real, and a path that everyone can follow? But that’s bit of a stretch. Little of what happens in Reawakening feels terribly believable, which sometimes interferes with the psychological tension that screenwriter/director Virginia Gilbert is building. The audience are asked to suppose that the mental anguish of loss could be so great that two people would become so utterly irrational that they could continue to talk to the police while not admitting that a child has returned home. The fear of continued media intrusion is offered as a half-hearted excuse. But it really doesn’t wash.

Ultimately, the film feels like watching the first two parts of a gloomy television drama without ever seeing the brilliant conclusion. The acting is more gripping than the storytelling. Reawakening is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 13 September.