In Spring 2020, the Covid lockdowns prevented American-born New Zealand director Jake Mahaffy from showing his indie horror film Reunion to live audiences. Although the timing was bad for earnings, it was also thematically serendipitous, as the film offers a rebuke to the very scientism that caused the lockdowns.
Mahaffy’s slow-moving, visually compelling films are best compared to those of celebrated Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky—fittingly, as Mahaffy is a graduate of Moscow’s VGIK cinema school. Tarkovsky’s science fiction masterpiece Stalker is set in the mysterious zona, a quarantined area where unexplainable, deadly phenomena occur. Mahaffy’s films likewise have their zona, circumscribed locations where supernatural—rather than science-fictional—threats are experienced. This trope is obvious in his early micro-budget film War (2004), but features more subtly in Free in Deed (2015) and Reunion. Tarkovsky’s toxic zona anticipated the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster that took place a few short years after the director’s early death from cancer. Reunion is similarly prophetic, speaking to the isolation and paranoia experienced by so many during the pandemic.
The film is set in subtropical New Zealand, in a Victorian mansion complete with a spiral staircase, a shadowy, wood-accented interior, and secret rooms. The wicked floral opulence, often refracted through the shard of a shattered crystal vase, is reminiscent of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Reunion stars Julia Ormond as Ivy, a domineering mother, and Emma Draper as Ellie, her pregnant daughter, a writer who has come to work on her book project for a few nights in her childhood home, which soon becomes the site of nostalgia-charged supernatural events.
Reunion is at once a horror story and a drama in which family secrets unfold one after another. In the opening scenes we see Ivy fixing up the house ahead of selling it while taking care of her ailing husband, Jack (John Bach), who suffers from dementia. Ellie is consumed with writing a book on how experimental science originated in medieval magical thinking. As part of her research, she listens to a taped lecture about non-linear time, and this precipitates a flood of troubling memories, including the image of a girl falling from the top of the spiral staircase. We later learn the girl is her adopted sister, whom Ellie has grown up believing she killed during a petty childhood dispute over the shattering of a crystal vase. As the narrative develops—driven by Ellie’s encounters with the ghost of her sister—each new coil draws the viewer back in time and deeper inside the terrible family secret that underlies her fascination with alchemy.
Ellie’s eventual liberation from guilt requires confronting her mother, who, herself infertile, resents Ellie for being pregnant and feels threatened by her questions about the past and her research into occult science. When Ellie recovers the full memory of her sister’s death, learning that it was her mother who pushed her over the banister, she forces a confession from Ivy. We then experience a calm in the story, where reconciliation feels achievable, after mother and daughter enjoy a brief catharsis. But it’s a false resolution, a misdirection, and things come to a head when Ivy burns Ellie’s writing and research materials. True catharsis only comes when Ellie uncovers the secret of her and her sister’s origin as products of the alchemical experiments of their “father.” While it’s possible those experiments began in answer to Ivy’s infertility, they became a blasphemous obsession.
“Scientism, occultism, esotericism—all the ‘isms’ are connected in the inherently vague, mystical and all-encompassing authority of their allusions,” Mahaffy told me in an email. “The origins of modern science in alchemical and neoplatonic natural philosophy is very interesting to me. That was one of the threads within Reunion.”
Given the film’s occult themes, it’s tempting to latch on to specific images to tease out their symbolic meaning: What, for example, does the crystal vase represent? The film’s opening words, from Ellie’s recorded lecture, even seem to challenge us to do so: “occult images and symbols . . . serve a dual and unified purpose to both hide and reveal, obscuring truth from those who do not know and revealing truths to those who are initiated.” Our impulse is to discover ourselves among the initiated. Mahaffy, however, warned me against this approach to his films: “There are meanings to some elements in these films but they aren’t meant to function as direct representations or riddles. I’m not being coy. The purpose of building relationships and significances in narrative design is to create an experience of complexity, coherence and depth for a viewer. Viewer interpretation is not so much forensic as imaginative.”
Mahaffy’s cinematography complements the narrative structure to accentuate this “experience of complexity, coherence and depth.” More important than what the shard of crystal vase represents is how in an early scene Ellie’s eye, and the world it beholds, is prismated kaleidoscopically as she looks through it. This and other scenes involving refracted images speak to trauma’s fragmentation of personality and memory, and foreshadow how the film's style becomes more non-linear as it goes on, with rapid transitions between memory and present action.
This use of cinematography to grapple with the metaphysics of time and personality suggests a natural alliance between film art and metaphysical probing. Elaborating on this element of cinema, Mahaffy writes,
A camera is a scientific device, really. It makes a highly literal, photographic representation of material reality. Filming simply involves pressing a button on a machine. There would seem to be no art or creativity in it. But ironically, the degree to which the image alludes to what is beyond scientific objectivity is what makes it unique. By organizing technical observations of material reality it proves the metaphysical. Drama, comedy, emotion, thematics, mystery, narrative, meaning, poetry, etc are found in the unstated, implied motivations and invisible relationships that force coherence on the photographic depictions. It's like speedy zen: you stare at the mountain until the mountain disappears. And then you see the mountain.
Mahaffy’s observation feels both timely and timeless. While science promises an understanding of external reality, its mission is never complete, its answers always subject to revision. Skepticism is necessary when looking through that crystal shard. The things that matter most, on which true understanding depends, lie beyond the scientifically captured image—human relationships and the divine.
Katya Sedgwick is a writer in the San Francisco Bay area.
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