Review: Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023)
Think "Fallen Leaves" meets "Cat Person," only less funny
Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023)
Directed by Rachel Lambert
This quiet indie film, set in a small, unnamed Pacific Northwest port town, is about a group of co-workers in a dull, mundane office. There’s almost no clue given about what their company, or agency, does, but as with the companies in “The Office” or the 2022 Jon Hamm movie “Corner Office,” it doesn’t matter. The film is about their quotidian small-town lives, and the strategies some of the employees use to keep at bay the hopeless repetition of their days and years.
One of the employees, Fran, is an evidently depressed young woman. Fran is intelligent and diligent enough to do her job well, while cringing at office small talk and the utter banality of occasions like a retiring coworker’s going-away party or the meeting where a new employee is introduced. She participates in these everyday activities, and in even more insignificant acts like making coffee in the break room or ordering office supplies, only long enough for the others to register her presence before slipping away unnoticed as soon as possible, back to her desk. With her dull, straight hair, her boring, simple department-store wardrobe, her bland meals (when the workers are asked to introduce themselves by saying their name and their favorite food, she says “Fran, cottage cheese”) and her affectless speech, everything about Fran suggests either trauma or chronic depression. If the title “Sometimes I Think About Dying” were something less direct, Daisy Ridley’s physical performance combined with her wardrobe and makeup scream it — silently, of course, and unnoticed by everyone, except the viewer.
The atmosphere of obligation and duty to one’s job, however meaningless, and the emphasis on repetition and deadpan line deliveries reminded me of “Fallen Leaves,” the Oscar-nominated Finnish film by Aki Kaurismäki .— only “Sometimes I Think About Dying” isn’t funny. The line “Fran, cottage cheese” could be funny, but the film doesn’t want you to laugh at Fran’s alienation — or her situation, which resembles so many jobs under capitalism (or, for that matter, democratic socialism; I’m sure working in, say, a British or Finnish bank, tax office or public agency is just as deadening). When Fran deigns to indicate to the new employee (Dave Merheje) that she might be amenable to an extracurricular activity, both the man — also named Robert, and with a beard that is only slightly less stupid-looking — and their awkwardness together reminded me of the film “Cat Person,” in which a bored college age woman is romanced by a man who is so supremely graceless that he manages to be creepy, and thus under suspicion for every sociopolitical transgression an ordinary man might commit in 2023. This film’s bearded Robert isn’t that bad; while the viewer may be put off by his confession to Fran in a chat message that he’s “never had a job before,” Fran is only momentarily disconcerted. “I’d keep that to myself,” she replies evenly. Maybe she was just grateful that someone at the office finally said something unexpected.
Their halting courtship develops after that and provides pretty much the only storyline. By the end of the film, there are signs that Fran might be recovering, a little bit, from her depression. This relative scarcity of narrative development means that the viewer seeks comfort and distraction from the film’s imagery, which features pretty scenery from the Pacific Northwest as well as short fantasy scenes — barely more than a few shots each — in which Fran imagines herself lying dead on a beach or a forest floor. There’s never any murderer or suicide method in her fantasies, she’s just dead, caught in a moment of wish fulfillment. As illustrated in the movie, these scenarios really are the most interesting thing about her, and her confession of these thoughts to Robert at the end of the film is a moment of freedom.
Daisy Ridley is, of course, best known to audiences as the heroine of the final “Star Wars” trilogy. The intensity that she brought to that role is harder to notice here, but that doesn’t mean it was easy to play someone without tics, without affect, more or less invisible until she finally reveals herself.