Sometimes I Think About Dying

dir: Rachel Lambert

2024

Rarely do I go on such an emotional rollercoaster as I did with this film.

I started off loving it, loving the heck out of it. I really did.

I feel like such a fool. I feel like someone examined my psyche and watched my many habits and behaviours from a distance, then proceeded to seduce me, and I’ve woken up the next morning with my wallet empty, any valuables gone and my bank accounts drained.

And then I’m left lying on the floor, wondering where it all went wrong.

The thing is, for a sucker to be sucked in, they have to already want to be tricked.

Set in a small coastal town on the Oregon coast, this flick takes its times to show the world that what I thought was the main character, being Fran (Daisy Ridley), lives in. She gets up, walks to work, doesn’t interact with people at work, finishes work, comes home, does a Sudoku or two, eats like a sparrow, drinks a tiny bit, then sleep.

Rinse repeat. When circumstances threaten to require her to interact with people, she deftly avoids it, sidesteps it, does the bare minimum required. When called upon to write in a card for a co-worker who’s retiring, she can’t muster any positive feelings or any words beyond “happy retirement”.

And like the title indicates, she often thinks of herself as being dead. She imagines herself dead in a forest, or dead on a beach, just generally the world without her being alive.

We all have tendencies. The kinds of people that would watch a flick like this, in the arthouse cinema of our choice, after having a latte and maybe an almond croissant?, we would be a particular type of cinemagoer (overeducated, underemployed, pontificating, pretentious, progressive except when something impacts our own back yards, in which case we turn into arch-conservatives). We, knowing oh so much about everything, would be unable to avoid trying to diagnose someone like Fran.

We would watch Fran interacting or not interacting with people, and we would, through lack of someone actively telling us what the actual deal is, decide what she probably ‘has’, or ‘how’ she is. Potentially we could spend more time running through the list of possible diagnoses than we do focusing on all the things that don’t happen in this flick.

You could start thinking that maybe she’s neurodivergent, but when you find out that the term isn’t a medical one, you start thinking along more conventional / Dr Google lines, like, “maybe she’s depressed, maybe she has a personality disorder, like, maybe an avoidant personality disorder, suicidal ideation, maybe schizophrenia?” We look at some of the artfully constructed tableaus, and wonder where she fits into them, where we fit into them. Are we observing her imaginings, or are these images as real to her as anything else that’s happening in the film?

And then when you admit to yourself, like I have to, that my own mental health disorder is constantly diagnosing other people with what I imagine are their mental health disorders, I have to close the DSM-V that I virtually carry around with me, chill the fuck out, and then wonder what’s left to observe in the flick.

Part of its seduction of me was also the lush score that overwhelms some scenes, right from the beginning. Dabney Morris composes and arranges and plays some of those pieces, and they’re better than the movie, I’m telling you now. They’re so much better than anything that happens in the movie, and they fooled me into taking the leap and caring about characters that I now feel weren’t worth my time or emotions.

I don’t need things spelled out for me. I don’t need signposts or subtext turning into text in order for me to get things, or understand things, or come to terms with things. But I need something.

Fran is a set of tics and affectations, and I really am reluctant to say this, with nothing seemingly behind it all. I can watch flicks about complex, emotionally shut down or shut off characters all day every day. I don’t need or want characters saying things like “and it’s all because of this one thing that happened 14 years ago” or “the reason for everything that you’ve seen in the last 45 minutes is .”

The precipitating event that gets Fran to consider that maybe she wants to connect with people, either for the first time or again, is that someone new is employed at her dull office to replace the retiree. He’s Rob (Dave Merheje), and he’s just a guy, affable enough, but no more forceful a personality than any other person in the office, just as prone to banal statements as any of the rest of them.

But Fran sees something, maybe the novelty of a new person, for whom she can perform in new ways, because he doesn’t know her at all. He talks to her in film references, from Dazed and Confused, which would be hilarious if he eventually realised that ‘Fran”, or Daisy Ridley, was born in 1992, a year before the flick came out. In all their interactions, from beginning to end, she is awkward, and guarded, and gives almost nothing away about herself, whether it’s with him or any other work person. She never seems comfortable, ever.

Finally I feel seen! Finally some of my people are up on the silver screen!

Never let them tell you that representation doesn’t matter.

But, and this is a “but” so large that Sir Mix-a-Lot himself would kneel down before it and worship it like the big butts he was renowned for, at no stage do I remember there being a time when the cover this awkwardness implies gives way to some other depths of personality or character. She expresses nothing of herself, and by the end I deeply struggled with whether there was ever anything there other than a void.

That might be entirely intentional on the director’s part. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but audiences sometimes love them, because then we can project whatever we want onto characters that are so blank. Other than her habits, which seem to be connected to a rejection of food, and her lack of desire to talk to anyone, or a scene towards the end where she seems to loll about on the carpet of her apartment for a couple of days, and her tableaus of imagined death, what do we have? Who have we been watching?

Well, I don’t know. I felt miffed, and aggrieved at the end, even as I suspected the trick they’d just pulled on me. The ending seems like it’s some kind of crisis, or crescendo, or maybe catharsis, that presumes almost that there’s been some stage reached where maybe Fran will allow herself to connect to people from now on, but it felt a little bit like a joke, even when what she says to Rob seems like a cry for help. I had no sense that whatever meant she couldn’t connect with people before had changed in any way such that she would now be able to.

Unless someone wants to make the case that something has fundamentally shifted within Fran at film’s end such that she now knows how to communicate with people, or how to ingratiate herself to the people at work, based solely on the conversation she has with Carol, the woman who retired and didn’t end up going on the retirement adventure she’d hoped for.

Carol (Marcia DeBonis, who I suspect is the only human person who actually acts in the whole film) expresses more humanity and emotion in three minutes of screen time than the previous 90 minutes or so represented. Everything else that could have elicited feelings or thoughts was purely visual and musical, never related to performances.

The note upon which the flick concludes, seeing as it uses the song With a Smile and a Song from the original animation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, recalling all the scenes of deer walking around the place, and the strange visual cues of the natural world springing forth in the printer room of the offices where they work kinda imply that Fran has come back to life like a Disney heroine, in order to get her happily ever after, and to that I have to say “wow”.

What an unearned ending, but then this is just after she says something that would make most people run out of the room. Maybe there’s hope for these two crazy kids, but I really, really couldn’t see it.

Maybe it’s a better, more organic flick than I’m giving it credit for, maybe the flick makes more sense than I am giving it credit for, but it really didn’t feel like it on first watch. Not by a long shot.

6 times I sometimes think about death but I think about life more out of 10

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“It’s hard, isn’t it? Being a person?” – some days it’s harder than others - Sometimes I Think About Dying