Recluse world première at Tribeca, 4 June 2026
“My mum was a big fan of his work.” This is what three different people are heard saying of the artist Lawrence Wyatt (Xander Berkley) over the course of Recluse. We first see Lawrence in its prologue, splashing paint over a canvas in his atelier before a woman emerges from the shadows and sets him, quite literally, on fire. In fact Lawrence has long been ablaze in the art world. He has won acclaim for his darkly textured works which can fetch millions on the market – and his cultish notoriety has not exactly been harmed by the so-called “Wyatt family curse” which over the years has seen the drowning, Don’t Look Now-style, of his young son Owen (Thomas Cancellara) on the estate, and the unsolved disappearance of his long-suffering concert pianist wife Andrea. Still, for all Lawrence’s one-time rock-and-roll status as a womaniser, a wild man and “a fucking psycho”, his appeal has broadly been to his own contemporaries, while the focus of Henry Chaisson’s directorial feature debut is the next generation – the children of the mothers who once adored him.
Lawrence’s estranged adult daughter Joan (Sasha Frovola), a sound engineer, is summoned from the New York townhouse where she lives alone to the huge family property in Berkshires, Massachusetts. Joan is a mess with a reputation for self-sabotage – and now she is returning to the wellspring of her trauma, the childhood home where all the grief, guilt and loss first set in, to face her demons once more. She finds her father now hideously burnt under a grotesque mask, and laid up on his deathbed just waiting to take his last breath. There are others on the property – not just the odd fan trying to get a photo, or Tom Grainger Jr. (Frankie Seratch), heir (as his name suggests) to his father’s art agency and desperate to get his hands on any remaining artworks in Lawrence’s workshop, but also Lawrence’s doughty, devoted housekeeper Lydia (Toby Poser), Lydia’s adult son Todd (Kimball Farley) who is now working as the gardener, and the new nurse Emily (Mia Vallet). Between them, there is also an axe, a crossbow and a mallet. Trouble and danger are stirring in the echoes.
Emily is just the last in a line of nurses who have all left under a cloud, spooked by the voices that they hear in this old dark house – and Joan too becomes convinced that there is a ghostly presence haunting the gothic halls. Her recording equipment picks up strange sounds within, she keeps seeing – or imagining – her father or another masked figure impossibly out of bed. Objects seems to move about of their own accord, while a child’s ball rolls out from no obvious source, recalling Peter Medak’s haunted house classic The Changeling (1980). As Andrea had said in an old tape recording that she left for her daughter, “There’s something in this place.”
It is hard to be sure which of laid up, locked-in Lawrence and alienated, fragile Joan is the better fit for the film’s title – but there are other secrets lurking in this remote house, amid the old cobwebs, creepy artworks and painful memories. Tom Grainger Jr describes Lawrence’s art as “a fascinating proxy for the tragedies of his own life.” Indeed, in this strange hall of mirrors (or echo chamber), where everyone seems at some point to have made art in imitation of the house’s patriarch, where mad dad Lawrence’s legacy is as much genetic as material, and where a child inevitably takes after both daddy and mummy, Lawrence, who sculpted masks and aestheticised death, and whose best work was inspired by the sufferings around him, is now becoming like one of his own artworks. It is an apt fate for a narcissist.
Yet if Lawrence constantly influences the visuals of Recluse, Joan orchestrates the audio, whether she is listening to old tapes for clues, amplifying her own recordings, playing her mother’s favourite piano piece, or tuning into the house’s creaks and cracks. For if Recluse is a (mostly rationalised) ghost story, it is, like Alanté Kavaïté’s Écoute le temps (2007), Abby Brenker and Ellyn Vander Wyden’s Voices Carry (2025), Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap (2025) and Ian Tuason’s Undertone (2025), dominated by noises off and overwhelming, impeccable sound design. Ultimately this is a psychodrama of damaged genealogies and bad blood. “If there really is a curse,” Emily says, “how do you get rid of it?” Some families, it seems, are doomed to their own dysfunction and derangement, emanating from the house’s head.
strap: Neighbouring sounds (of legacy): Henry Chaisson’s superb debut feature concerns a haunted family, with creepy underpinnings in art and acoustics
© Anton Bitel
