Roza Modeau

This film is about unrealised desire and loneliness in death; about the fact that this is the truth for most of us. It is also about the ruminating struggle of dealing with and extinguishing deep longing for unrealisable relationships, tormented feelings about claustrophobic familial bonds, the lift provided by culture, intellect and critical social thought in the depths of despair. To me, what many reviewers found incomprehensible or disappointing resonated absolutely. The film exceeds the book in its universality and sacrifices thriller kicks for its sake. The janitor is not an abnormal weirdo loner — it could be anyone. The empathy required to construct the voice of the female narrator is that of someone passionately, intellectually, obsessively in love with an idealised figure but still one that does not conform to a stereotypical male fantasy of a woman. That to me was the most devastating element of love (with a person in one’s past): enough love and despair to know that she is frighteningly intelligent and ‘thinking of ending things’, even in his attempt at wishful imagining, or perhaps the wish for it to not have worked anyway, so that it can be let go. There is a lot more to say—I only touch on the aesthetics and acting. Jessie Buckley is fascinating as ever. I loved the combination of realism and temporal / visual discontinuity. I think it is the most effective representation of memory, thought and longing I have ever seen in a film. The only star missed is because the parents, although clearly loved, come across as a little one-dimensional, so complexity of feelings for his parents here is compromised.