Devendra P Varma wrote in a book on Gothic literature about the uneasy or haunted house, “If those walls could speak, they could tell strange things, for they have looked upon sad doings.” Henry Chaisson’s debut feature Recluse features a sprawling estate and home where the walls are speaking; a place of bad things where the tragedies of the past live on soaked into the corners and displayed upon the walls. A contemporary Gothic horror where the aspect of dread permeates both the house and the people who spend time there and is born of disconnection and distrust.
Lawrence Wyatt (Xander Berkeley) is a highly regarded painter and sculptor working one night alone in his home-based studio. His work is kinetic, energetic, and dark. After a tape recording of a piano concerto finishes on a tape deck, Lawrence hears something. He calls that he knows that someone is there. The flash of a match illuminates a female face for a moment and then fire spreads to Lawrence engulfing him.
Joan Wyatt (Sasha Frolova) is a sound recorder living in the city. As Lawrence’s daughter, she’s used to hearing how much people love his artwork, but she’s not used to hearing how people feel about her work. Lacklustre would probably be the response. Joan has one of her father’s artworks tattooed on her forearm which appears to be the only permanent connection she has with her estranged father. That is until he calls her from his home hospital bed telling her that he “heard her” and “she was right in the room.” Joan assumes he means her missing mother, concert pianist Andrea who went missing many years ago. She decides to go back to her childhood home to see her father, now extremely burned and immobile, and also to search for sounds that might shed light on her mother’s whereabouts.
The Wyatt residence is a mansion with an extensive park surrounding it. As Joan drives to the house she recalls her childhood with her now-deceased brother Owen whose unlikely death by drowning in a water feature is one of the reasons that the Wyatts are considered to be a cursed family. Her father’s triumph in the art world is partially from recreating his trauma of loss via hard and depressing works. Lawrence’s recent accident has given the media reason to speculate further on the Wyatt Curse, a curse that Joan assumes will one day take her too.
Far from a warm welcome, when Joan arrives at the door her family’s long-time housekeeper Lydia (Toby Poser) upbraids her for her extended absence. When Joan looks in on Lawrence his injuries are significant with third and fourth degree burns covering his body. His face is bandaged (resembling one of his sculptural moulds) and his voice weak. The kind of burns one does not recover from. Nevertheless, he is being cared for by an even-tempered and kind nurse named Emily (Mia Vallet) who calls her a blessing as two nurses had to be let go of. One because he apparently stole from the house, and the other because she heard voices in the walls and had a mental breakdown.
To call the current temperature in the house cold would be underselling the fractured relationships within it. The house is a monument to Lawrence’s art with his challenging sculptures and hard-lined portraits seemingly in every room. The one place that hasn’t changed at all is Owen’s bedroom which has been left untouched since his death. Joan’s bedroom with her cassette tapes and compact discs is much more impersonal, yet it affords her the opportunity to use her highly sensitive recording equipment to “hear” the house. If there are voices in the walls, Joan has questions to ask them. Perhaps they will at least speak to her about her mother, still missing after so many years.
There is one person at the house who does seem pleased to see her. Lydia’s son Todd (Kimball Farley) has returned from a non-starter music career elsewhere and is now the gardener and groundskeeper for the Wyatt home. Todd is sympathetic to Joan and her feelings of isolation and confusion and begins to help her to unravel some of the mysteries locked in the house. He’s her only real ally, although Emily is deferent – but Emily is an outsider who can’t understand the Wyatts. She’s also been led by voices into the darker recesses of the property; one she claims is Owen playing hide and seek with her.
Father and daughter don’t have a loving reunion, but there is an effort to close the gap between them. Although she finds what he rasps to be delirious. “Get me out of here. Can you hear? Listen!” Listening and looking is what Joan has been doing. She’s also been remembering through the cassette tapes in her room and the home movie super 8 films that serve as her memory. Something is wrong with the house, she can feel it, and so can Emily and Todd. Perhaps it was the “dark enchantments” her father was supposed to have enacted, or perhaps the ghosts of the past are not ready to let go. Also, is Lawrence himself up to something distressing?
Henry Chaisson is a master of aural discomfort which is in his wheelhouse as multi-hyphenate in sound design, composing, writing, and editing. Technically Recluse is extremely polished, and the mood and atmosphere coupled with the heavy artwork and production design work overtime to paper over the less polished aspects of the script. The same can be said for the performances with Sasha Frolova, Toby Poser and Kimball Farley doing accomplished work. That’s not to say that Xander Berkeley isn’t, but he doesn’t have a lot to do for the lion’s share of the film as a bedridden patient. In the third act Mia Vallet shines.
The biggest flaw Recluse has is that the audience is ahead of the film in terms of the mystery of what is happening in the Wyatt house. It could be the preponderance of clues that come very quickly one after the other that answers most of the questions the film proffered. However, the look and feel, and particularly the sound of Recluse are perfect for a contemporary Gothic horror. Recluse doesn’t hold its cards close enough to its chest, but they’re still great cards and the end result is an unsettling and uneasy journey into the modern uncanny.
Director, Writer, Producer, Composer: Henry Chaisson
Cast: Sasha Frolova, Xander Berkeley, Toby Poser, Mia Vallet, Kimball Farley
Editor: Nik Voytas, Henry Chaisson
Cinematographer: Bryce Holden
Sound: Matthew Rollins
Recluse debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in 2026