This comedy-drama might have a title that seems like it was run through some Sundance film naming algorithm, but Rachel Lambert‘s quiet, thoughtful indie doesn’t descend into the kind of determined quirk and whimsy you might expect. Instead Sometimes I Think About Dying is characterised by its stillness and its restraint. So much so in fact, that despite Daisy Ridley delivering a performance to banish the post-franchise slump, the film leaves little impact beyond a lingering phantom sense of something pleasant; like a friendly neighbourhood dog you haven’t seen in a while.
Fran (Ridley) is a painfully withdrawn worker in a correspondingly drab office, quietly imploding in on herself while the rest of her likeable enough exchange gentle banter and go about their generic movie-unspecific shuffling of papers and looking purposeful by the photo copier. Anything remotely involving social interaction, such is a colleague’s retirement is done with minimal engagement before she can head home to solitary meals of cottage cheese and wine. Her only outlet seems to be her odd little daydreams where she imagines herself dead; hanging from the crane she can see from her office window, in decorous, glassy-eyed repose like a Shakespearean heroine, or involved in a sudden car accident. Then the cheerful Robert (Dave Merheje) joins the team and sees something engaging in Fran that convinces him to try and dig beneath the surface of this enigmatic young woman.
Ridley’s performance is a very astute one, avoiding the stasis or the mannered tics that can creep into an internalised performance. She’s soulful enough to convince that there is a Fran worth getting to know beyond the blank exterior. Thankfully she provides the movie with that subtle burning flame, as compositionally the film is rather static. There are only a few instances of Dustin Lane‘s camera moving at all. Everything else is conveyed through the close editing of carefully blocked, but stationary frames. Some unusual shot choices that emphasise unusual angles or and odd choice of focus aside, it adds a jittery sense of artifice that’s missing from the narrative.
It can’t be denied however that this approach does work very well. Captured in the back of a frame, Fran’s isolation is often intensified, the choice of shot emphasising what a close-up perhaps wouldn’t while not asking to much of Ridley. Close-ups also work well as she begins to thaw during the genuinely sweet dates she has with Robert. Merheje is a relaxed and generous presence and it’s genuinely lovely watching Fran allowing her eyes to flit in his direction as she feeds him breadcrumbs about her life, daring to ponder the possibility of connection.
Unfortunately the film stalls in that mode, forcing a narrative jump into conflict and reconciliation that really comes from rom-com necessity, and is too jarring a splash in the film’s tranquil waters. Sometimes I Think About Dying works when it simply allows its two leads to exist in each other’s space, and have the themes of social anxiety and depression drift in the subtext – despite the ‘death’ scenes it’s not a movie about suicide ideation; they’re more like an aesthetic nod to the tableaux of Harold and Maude or Ginger Snaps with the surreal humour and grand guignol removed. Sadly, despite its sweetness and that careful, deliberate and subtle performance from Ridley, it’s a frustrating sense of competing impulses at work. It’s not really a rom-com, but can’t resist those beats. It avoids a lot of the ‘Sundance’ cliches, but at times it can’t help but dip a toe into those waters (the death tableaux are absolutely fine, but that murder party scene – if artisanal vegan brownies were a social event). It’s a pleasing construct and one wills Ridley to transcend the Star Wars malaise, but it’s so dialled down that the things it tries to say are whispers carried away in the breeze.
Screening as part of Sundance Film Festival