Here Before (2021) BBC2, BBC iPlayer, written and directed by Stacey Gregg.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f7wn/here-before

Reincarnation isn’t such a big deal if you’re the Dalai Lama, Buddhist, or many other religions that believe the afterlife comes back to haunt you, but for ten-year-old Megan (Niamh Dornanin) in contemporary Northern Ireland it could be problematic. Her parents, a young couple, Chris (Martin McCann) Marie (Eileen O’Higgins) have moved next door to Laura (Andrea Riseborough), Brendan (Jonjo O’Neill) and their teenage son, Tadhg (Lewis McAskie). That’s the set up.

I followed a series on Prime in which young children recounted former lives to disbelieving parents that gradually came to believe the impossible.

Don’t Look Now based on a Daphne Du Maurier short story, and starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland did something similar in Venice in 1973.

In 2010, Rabbit Hole, Nicole Kidman plays a mother whose child is killed in a car accident, much the same as Laura and Brendan’s daughter. Birth, also having Kidman in the key role of the grieving mother, takes a step backward, or forward when a young boy claims to be the reincarnation of her former husband.

Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery starts with grieving parents bring back their cat to life and then their daughter.

Shakespeare, the dead such as in Hamlet, walk and talk. A poem in the Scottish dialect, I read at school had much the same theme. A grieving family praying that the drowned would return.

What I’m implying is there are lots of ways to go with this. Laura (Andrea Riseborough) the mother carries the burden of making the incredible credible. It’s her we watch to carry the viewer over the threshold of the invisible. Grief can be bent into many shapes. Laura starts as sceptical as us, but convinces herself that there’s probably nothing in it. Megan is like her daughter, but she’s not her daughter. A brilliant performance.

It works for me, but then I began to lose the thread of the plot. The denouement baffled me. I got it intellectually, but…where was the motivation or moving force? You tell me.