Phillip Sevy

Sometimes I Think About Dying opens with a beautiful piece of music as the camera moves through a picturesque Pacific Northwest port town. It’s soulful and emotive and signals the quiet pain and yearning the movie conveys. We end in an office on the edge of the water where Fran (played exquisitely by Daisy Ridley) sits in her cubicle, content and comfortable in her job managing office supplies and requests, watching the simple, if almost boring, lives of her coworkers. Fran is among them but not part of them. Her attention occasionally wanders to the cranes outside, dreams from the night and other places and situations that are decidedly not here. 

Her isolation and anxiety draw out over the first 25 minutes almost to the point of tedium, until new coworker Robert (Dave Merheje) begins messaging her, making jokes, conversation and all-around general charmingness. Fran doesn’t know how to react. All of her responses show her awkwardness in social situations. As Robert persists and slowly pushes Fran into a place of talking, they begin to form a friendship that Fran struggles to understand or navigate. 

Daisy Ridley is both sublime and infinitely charming in this role. So much so that you wonder why we’re not seeing so much more of her in films (and a hope that this film also reminds other filmmakers and execs of this same question). She does an incredible job expressing the pain and barriers that social anxiety incurs. At how attempts to break through those barriers can often result in awkward moments or overstepping of boundaries. Dave Merheje’s extroverted charm provides us with a source of warmth to contrast against the coldness of Fran that we spend most of the movie with. 

Director Rachel Lambert (working from a script by Kevin Armento, Stefanie Abel Horowitz and Katy Wright-Mead) does an incredible job creating a sense of longing and distance as we observe the lives of the people around Fran. On the surface, the subjects of their conversations, discussions and concerns seem banal, trivial or even laughable. They feel like a less funny version of The Office. But underneath the conversations about monitor cables and office supplies, Rachel lets us in on what it feels like to be Fran—to be witnessing life around her without the ability to be involved. To forever be trapped at a distance. 

And here is where my primary concern with the film lies—so much of that pain and struggle is kept at an emotional distance from us. Social anxiety, suicidality and depression manifest often in quiet, silent moments externally. Internally, they are powerful forces and emotions that make the everyday actions of life sometimes extremely difficult and challenging. And while we see the external struggle of Fran, the peeks we get into the inner turmoil are fleeting and feel far away. Fran never seems to want anything in life. Though pained as she might be, she never seems to long for that which she doesn’t have. She just observes it. She doesn’t feel like she risks anything in her actions. She doesn’t seem like she wants to make a change in her life or to upend the world she’s stuck in. So while the pain of her struggles is real (especially to those who understand them in their own lives), Fran is kept distant from us, the audience, in a way that robs some of the emotional complexity and power that is under the skin of the script and Daisy Ridley’s performance. 

Quiet, careful and measured, Sometimes I Think About Dying gives us a strong performance of a woman trapped in the quiet space her anxiety has created for her—a space that I wish we could have seen more.

Upcoming Sundance Film Festival screenings of Sometimes I Think About Dying: Friday, January 27, 2023 at 3:15pm MST at Eccles Theatre, Park City.

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“She’s young. It’s not too late for her to have a real family” coaxes Geena Davis’ character “Munca” at the beginning of Fairyland, based on the 2013 memoir of the same name by Alysia Abbott. It follows young father Steve Abbott (Scoot McNairy), as he takes his five-year-old daughter Alysia to San Francisco to raise her by himself after his wife is killed in a car accident. At his wife’s funeral, her mother tries to reason with him to leave his daughter in her care so that she can be raised in a traditional household with a traditional family. Steve rejects that and takes her across the country.

Fairyland in an exploration of what a family is and how the roles of parent and child can be defined and redefined continually throughout life. Once in San Francisco, in 1971, Steve is able to live as an out gay man—something only afforded to him in secrecy up to this point in his life. He hides nothing from his daughter as she becomes an integral part of his relationships, their found family, and home. The film follows their relationship through adulthood as they grapple with substance abuse, neglect, empowerment, homophobia, life, loss and the AIDS epidemic.

Directed and written by Andrew Durham, Fairyland is a heavy, deep, and poignant film. It’s never easy to watch, but Durham doesn’t get bogged down in melodrama or preaching. The entire world and message is filtered through the lives of this father and daughter who struggle under the expectations placed on them by the outside world while in the unexplored territory of their approach to life. 

Durham begins the film, shooting on grainy film stock, with the handling and approach of a brand new filmmaker, but deftly shifts the look and feel of the film to more steady, clear, and mature filmmaking as time goes on. It’s a subtle shift, but masterfully done as Alysia (Emilia Jones) grows up and grows more steady in her role as child/parent to Steve. 

The painful contradiction at the center of the film is that Steve wants to provide a life of freedom, independence, and love to his daughter that he never had. His lack of ability to live authentically has left him in an eternal state of arrested development. When he’s thrown into the role of single parent, he’s not ready or able to raise a child. He struggles and somewhat fails to live up to that role for the rest of his life. But Alysia, with the life she was given, is able to grow up and live up to the challenges life presents her. Toward the end of the film, she’s thrust into a role of responsibility and has to return to the AIDS-ravaged city of her upbringing and care for her ailing father. A role she is not ready for, but one that she is able to rise and meet with strength, compassion, fearlessness and love. 

And that’s the beauty of Fairyland. Bravery and authenticity do not guarantee success, but they provide platforms for others to live the truest versions of their lives because noble failures illuminate the path to noble successes. 

With an incredible cast, led by Scoot McNairy and anchored by Emilia Jones, Fairyland doesn’t move like a traditional narrative film—where choices and challenges of the characters would advance the plot. Time advances the plot. Choices made inside that time change lives, but not the eventual outcome. We’re allowed a window into these quiet lives as they grow, move forward, and wind down. McNairy (as Steve Abbott) brings a cheery, ever-present optimism through the struggles and pain of both his internal and external life. Regardless of his failings and successes, he manages to convey the wonder and love of a poet parent. Emilia Jones portrays Alysia from teenage years into adulthood, a challenging tasks as she struggles to come to terms with the responsibility thrust on her from childhood to care for herself and her father. Her acting is quiet and fierce, stable and caring. 

All in all, the story of Steve and Alysia Abbott told through Fairyland, is a story of the power of family—whether traditional or not—and how the courage to live your life empowers all of those around you.

Upcoming Sundance Film Festival screenings of Fairyland:

Redstone Cinemas – 7, Tuesday, January 24, 2023 9:00PM MT at Redstone Cinemas – 7

Thursday, January 26, 2023 11:20AM MT at The Ray Theatre

Saturday, January 28, 2023 11:55AM MT at Rose Wagner

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It’s no secret that often the most interesting, daring and boundary-pushing films found at the Sundance Film Festival are often the Midnight Selections. These films focus on “horror flicks and wild comedies to chilling thrillers and works that defy any genre” and are often compelling and entertaining. The first movie I watched this year was from this category and definitely met these expectations. 

birth/rebirth is directed by Laura Moss (from a script by them and Brendan J. O’Brien) and stars Marin Ireland and Judy Reyes. The official synopsis explains the setup for the film:

Rose is a pathologist who prefers working with corpses over social interaction. She also has an obsession — the reanimation of the dead. Celie is a maternity nurse who has built her life around her bouncy, chatterbox 6-year-old daughter, Lila. One unfortunate day, their worlds crash into each other. The two women and young girl embark on a dark path of no return where they will be forced to confront how far they are willing to go to protect what they hold most dear.

Laura Moss’ directing is strong and measured—building a palpable sense of dread from the first frame. They manage to oscillate from scenes of revulsion to scenes of quiet pain throughout the first act, masterfully. Strong performances from the leads guide the film and keep you riveted, if not questioning the motivations behind the extreme and sometimes violent acts the characters chose throughout the film. The humanity and single-minded myopathy of the characters keep you riveted throughout as the film unfolds. 

The movie deals with themes of motherhood, creating life and the extremes we will go to in order to preserve those abilities. This is a theme among a lot of Sundance movies this year (little surprise, coming off not only last year’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, but of years of states ramping up their powers to strip women of their bodily autonomy) and this film doesn’t shy away from the exploration of these ideas. 

birth/rebirth falls squarely in the “slow burn” category of horror. And while that approach isn’t new, it has been getting a lot more attention with films from A24 and similar studios in the last few years (see Under the Skin, The VVitch, Hereditary, Midsommar and others). The key conceit of these films is that we, as the audience, will sit with patient anticipation for the eventual ramp up and explosion of the climax. This type of horror rewards its viewers with a payoff that is often jaw-dropping, horrifying and unexpected. 

Sadly, this is where birth/rebirth falters. As one would expect with a film about reanimating a corpse, there’s a point in the film that hints at the violence and savagery that such an act will bring. And just as the film exhausts the extremes the living will go to in order to save the ones they love, it ends without exploring the consequences of losing control of that which you have fought to control—life (or unlife) itself. I was gearing up for a third act that was off-the-rails—exploring the fallout of an undead creature unconstrained and out of control. The setup was there and the pacing was building to it—and the film ended instead. 

A solid start to the festival—one that left me cringing and looking away multiple times while also understanding the painful plight of the characters, but left me cold, in the end, when it failed to take off and live up to the promises the script made. 

There is another screening of birth/rebirth on Wednesday, January 25th at 6 p.m. at Redstone Cinema 7 (6030 Market St, Park City, UT).

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