‘Recluse’ Review: Gothic, Slow Burn Horror That Leaves a Mark [Tribeca]

Recluse, the debut feature from writer-director Henry Chaisson is a classically gothic horror mystery built on exceptional sound design and a delicate application of well worn tropes that feel properly preserved, not tired. It’s a slow-burn upstate American ghost story in the lineage of Burnt Offerings and Ghost Story, embroidered with a disturbing family mystery and themes that can run very dark.

Joan (Sasha Frolova), a sound recordist living in isolation, returns to her father’s estate in the wake of a devastating fire. Her father is a famous, enormously wealthy artist, now unwell after the traumatic accident and requiring around-the-clock care inside his gothic estate in the middle of nowhere. As Joan traces a series of ghostly audio fragments, she uncovers a buried family secret, and someone intent on keeping it that way. Chaisson plays with a set of aesthetics and tropes I happen to love, and shapes them into something genuinely chilling.

The sound is the obvious headliner, and it earns its billing. It’s impeccable, rivalling undertone, a film marketed on the back of its sound design. It’s important to note that this is produced, in part, by Steven Schneider who also had a hand in producing undertone and Hokum. What makes the sound work here is that it is not purely technical. It is thematic, woven into a story whose protagonist listens for a living. The opening scene is one of the strongest beats in the film. It does not represent everything that follows, but it announces a certain register of hardcore spookiness that I always love to see.

And that register is worth dwelling on. When you picture spooky cinema, it’s not always a picture of something hard-hitting, shocking, or difficult, and is a reminder that this kind of horror can also be tough to swallow at times. works in a similar realm, especially with , a film that shares some DNA around the edges with . There is also a strong streak of those nasty EC Comics from the fifties, the same well that the “Father’s Day” segment of drew from. The set dressing is elegant, gothic, ghostly, but the skeleton underneath is grotesque, nightmarish, and a little B-rate, in the most complimentary sense.