Past Life had its world première at Grimmest, 9th Oct 2025
“Syria, six years ago,” reads the text that opens Simeon Halligan’s Past Life, as we are shown a harrowing sequence in which journalist Jason Frey (Aneurin Barnard), abducted by Islamic State, sees his own left hand being crushed with a mallet before he is forced helplessly to watch his colleague Jane Carter (Lucinda Sinclair) have her throat fatally cut. The point of that opening text is not just to situate this prologue’s events in a particular time and place, but also to remind us, as the film’s very title does, of the persistent importance of the past to this film’s present.
Jason survived his Syrian ordeal, and is now, six years later, back in Manchester, with his pregnant wife Claira (Pixie Lott) due soon to deliver a new future for them – but nonetheless Jason still carries with him the trauma of his past, not just in the damaged left hand that will never again move and grip properly, and is permanently bound in a black protective glove, but also in his mind, still afflicted with PTSD and nightmares. Yet amid all the horrific flashbacks, Jason is about to be introduced to a new portal on the past, and to some cold cases from much longer than merely six years ago.
When American hypnotist Timothy Bevan (Jeremy Piven) comes to town to promote his latest book on past life regression, Jason attends Timothy’s show and is invited to be his subject on stage. Though cynical about the whole process, Jason is quickly transported in his mind not just back to his Syrian experiences, but to something further back in time and even more upsetting. Undergoing more hypnotherapy with Timothy, Jason realises that he is both gifted and cursed with the perspective of a local black-gloved serial killer at large in the late Eighties, until he was somehow killed and reincarnated in the newborn Jason.
Timothy smells an opportunity to write a new book and to prove his theories on past life regression. Jason’s motives are more complex: for while he too sees a possible true crime article in this, he is also desperate to redeem his own haunted past and sense of guilt, and hopes to bring belated closure to the long-dead victims’ relatives. Yet as this odd couple obsessively investigates the past murders, they engage in further hypnotherapy sessions while consulting police detective Jenny Sage (Karlina Grace-Paseda), true-crime podcaster Elliott Reed (Nicholas Farrell) and mind control academic Sebastian Drake (Tim McInnerny), all of whom, like Timothy himself, were in Manchester at the time of the killing spree.
So Past Life is a murder mystery with a supernatural element – think Irvin Kershner’s Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) mixed with Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (1997) and Alejandro Amenábar’s Regression (2015). Where the POV shot has long been used in the giallo and the slasher as a way simultaneously to show a killer’s atrocities being enacted, to efface their identity, and to forge an uneasy connection between killer and viewer, here it ingeniously represents Jason’s vicarious access to a past life lived out by someone else, while also creating ambiguity by masking intention. There is a complicated film grammar here that confounds conventional notions of identity and responsibility, as neither the one with a hypnosis-induced window seat on these murders, nor indeed the one executing them, need be straightforwardly to blame in a causal chain of killings where mens rea itself is subject to both mesmerism and manipulation.
Already wracked with guilt from his Syrian misadventure, Jason feels doubly tormented for (metem)psychotic visions that appear to place him – and us too – at, so to speak, the driver’s wheel of murder, even if the three young students were killed before Jason was even born. He will eventually be led by these windows on someone else’s experience to a place where he must relive the trauma of seeing someone dear to him with a knife held to her throat, as had happened to Jane Carter in the opening Syrian scene – only this time, Jason may be ready to redeem both the situation and himself. Although there is a limited number of suspects in the film’s line-up, Roy Bogdanovich and Dean Lines’ screenplay is full of twists and red herrings that will keep you guessing whodunnit.
The only problem, though – one certainly not exclusive to this film, but still worthy of being called out whenever it occurs – is that once the mechanics of the plot have been fully revealed, there is unnecessary and uneconomic resort to a montage of flashbacks to remind us how everything fits together, as though we had not already seen and heard these moments beforehand, and were somehow incapable of synthesising this information ourselves as the film, like a past life, replays in the corridors of our mind. Much more interesting, and thankfully presented more through suggestion than exhaustive exposition, is the question of what happens to the killer’s ‘soul’, or whatever it is that transmigrates from the recently dead to the newborn. One thing is for sure, even if the specifics of its meaning and consequences remain elusive: Jason has a deeply unusual, even unique, bond with his baby child, which paradoxically merges past, present and future, while redefining any normative understanding of epigenetic trauma.
strap: Simeon Halligan’s metempsychotic murder mystery forces a father-to-be to live through (and resolve) multiple traumas, not all his own.
© Anton Bitel
