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This year at the Tribeca Film Festival, writer-producer Henry Chaisson (Antlers, Servant) makes his feature directorial debut with Recluse, a sound-driven terror that blends bleak, ghostly horror with thrilling mystery.
Months after her father is injured in an accident, Joan (Sasha Frolova), an audio engineer working in the film industry, returns home to New England. Judging by her hesitation, it’s clearly a trip she doesn’t want to take, alluding to something traumatic that happened in her childhood and an estranged relationship with her dad, Lawrence Wyatt (Xander Berkeley). Early in his career, the renowned and reclusive artist earned a reputation for being strange and was rumored to have dabbled in the occult.
The family endured multiple tragedies that left Joan and her dad both very solitary people. Many believe there’s a Wyatt family curse, but throughout the film, it’s unclear whether the house is haunted, if the family is haunted, or both. Joan takes us on an auditory journey into the decaying mansion and the vast grounds as she confronts painful memories and tries to solve a long-held family mystery. She follows faint voices and indistinct muttering that lure her deeper and deeper into her old home.
As with many films these days, the cinematography is so dark that it’s nearly impossible to see anything during certain scenes. And in Recluse, there are a lot of them. While it’s slightly frustrating at first, it does build suspense, and the longer we can’t see, the more anxious we get. Straining your eyes in the dark, especially when trying to find where a random sound came from, is always unsettling. Like Joan, we’re forced to use our imagination in these moments until we get a jump scare.
The darkness has an eerie effect on the artwork, too. The mansion is filled with Lawrence’s white-on-black paintings, and whether it’s abstract (like a bunch of handprints) or portraiture, the pitch black rooms make the white figures look like disembodied ghostly faces. He also made surreal sculptures and many, many face masks that range from semi-childlike to pure nightmare fuel. Lawrence wears a stark white mask because he was severely burned in the fire, and it’s disturbing in both the light and the dark. There’s also a few dozen Hereditary-esque handcrafted dolls hidden around, but the artist behind those witchy stick figures is another mystery.
Although Joan is never shown actually watching Super 8 home movies, that’s how some flashbacks appear. The mix of vintage visuals and distorted sounds reminds me a lot of Sinister, which used the nostalgia of old film reels to create a steady sense of unease. Given Joan’s profession, the dread-inducing sound design is practically its own character. The house has the usual horror movie noises, like creaky floors and wind-blown doors, but Chaisson and Matthew Rollins (The Phoenician Scheme) created some indescribable sounds that were consistently unnerving. Recluse is an effective Gothic horror-thriller that has a strong grasp on atmosphere and sound. While the cinematography can be too dark at times, the film maintains a sufficiently ominous tone.
Movie Score: 4/5
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*Recluse premiered on June 4 at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival
