Lavender’s building blocks are so well worn—mysterious discoveries, creaky houses, darting specters—they might well be invisible were it not for another of its defining features: the efficiency and assuredness with which the whole affair is presented. The movie is streamlined to the point that you have to admire its dedication to offering, without so much as a wink, a ghost story about the gradual opening of a locked memory and the catharsis that awaits its heroine. Though it confines itself to a limited setting and few characters, and a story that can hardly be called “dynamic,” there’s a degree of satisfaction in Lavender’s journey and moral resolution. While the stylistic choices are too familiar to be surprising, there’s freshness in the way they are applied.
The film opens with a brief prologue in 1985 on an expansive rural property and the immediate aftermath of a murder scene in a family home. Shift to 25 years later, and we see Jane (Abbie Cornish) toting her school-age daughter Alice (Lola Flanery) on long drives through the countryside so she can take photographs of empty houses, most of them set back quite a way from the road. Jane has a romantic’s fascination with the houses, seeing them as epitaphs to the lives that once inhabited them.
There’s a restlessness to Jane, and she’s distracted by her own preoccupation with houses, becoming enthralled with one in particular. As she retreats into her obsession, we see the toll it takes on her marriage to Alan (Diego Klattenhoff), with whom there’s obvious tension and the suggestion of past infidelity that adds to the overall unease throughout the film.
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