Sometimes I Think About Dying
Daisy Ridley stars in an indie drama which, devoid of cliché, is almost astonishingly courageous in its brevity.
Bored to death? Daisy Ridley
Nature abhors a vacuum. So, when Fran Larsen (Daisy Ridley) says, “I’m not that interesting,” we crave to know more. What we do know is little. She lives alone and microwaves her dinners with a generous dollop of cottage cheese. She’ll have a glass of red wine but is cautiously temperate. She goes to bed early. She doesn’t own a cat. She doesn’t cut herself. And, sometimes, she thinks about dying. She works as a clerk at a nondescript office in a port city in Oregon and enjoys her job because she’s good at it, particularly spreadsheets. But if she ever stands by the water cooler, she will make sure she is unseen, invisible even. She looks on at her colleagues at a distance, vaguely intrigued by their inane chitchat. When she’s asked to sign a retirement card, crowded with ebullient messages of felicitation, she pauses, and writes, “happy retirement, fran,” in lower case. She’s a lower-case kind of girl.
Fran Larsen occupies the same tenuous empty space of such screen heroines as Isabelle Huppert’s Pomme in The Lacemaker, Heather Matarazzo’s Dawn in Welcome to the Dollhouse and Elsie Fisher’s Kayla in Eighth Grade, missing figures in a landscape. And, compared to the bores you meet at parties who cannot stop talking about themselves, Fran is a mesmerising enigma. She has nothing to say. But when she does talk, she speaks her truth: spontaneous, unvarnished, direct.
At first, viewing Rachel Lambert’s third feature (based on Kevin Armento’s play Killers) is like witnessing an episode of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s The Office: all surface bonhomie and awkwardness. Such superficiality is relieved by Fran’s daydreams, of levitating within her cubicle, standing in the downstairs basement with a python, or lying dead in the woods. Dreams are made of this. But she is not so much socially awkward as socially catatonic.
Then, when Robert Naser (Dave Merheje) joins the office ensemble, Fran’s colleagues are gathered around the boardroom table for an ice-breaking session and asked to name their favourite foods. “I’m Fran. I like cottage cheese,” is all Fran can vouchsafe, whereas Robert – an imposing, bald, middle-aged gentleman from Seattle – states, “I like Thai food. And I dig movies – and uncomfortable silences.” Obviously, he already has Fran’s measure. And, sure enough, after a playful email exchange (on his part), he invites her out to the movies. Under the circumstances, it’s a seismic shock that she actually accepts the invitation. Afterwards, over pie and Irish coffee, Robert confesses that the movie is his favourite. “I didn’t like anything about it,” Fran responds with predictable frankness. Of course, this is like a red flag to a bull...
With so much activity in Daisy Ridley’s previous films, it’s a shock to find her in something as minimalist as this. And that’s the point. We cannot take our eyes off her – because she appears to be totally inert. It takes a huge talent to appear to do nothing in front of the camera and Lambert is generous in her close-ups, sometimes framing her scenes off-centre to accentuate Fran’s feeling of alienation. The Oregon scenery adds considerable background flavour and, like the film that Fran so impulsively dismissed, Sometimes I Think About Dying digs its heels in and stays with you. Anymore than Robert, we don’t know what Fran’s artistic tastes amount to, and it’s this blank slate that makes her character such a mesmerising centre of focus.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Daisy Ridley, Dave Merheje, Parvesh Cheena, Marcia DeBonis, Meg Stalter, Brittany O'Grady, Bree Elrod, Lauren Beveridge, Ayanna Berkshire.
Dir Rachel Lambert, Pro Alex Saks, Daisy Ridley, Dori Rath, Lauren Beveridge and Brett Beveridge, Screenplay Kevin Armento, Stefanie Abel Horowitz and Katy Wright-Mead, from the play Killers by Kevin Armento, Ph Dustin Lane, Pro Des Daniel Maughiman, Ed Ryan Kendrick, Music Dabney Morris, Costumes Jordan Hamilton, Dialect coach Rick Lipton.
Point Productions/Saks Picture Company-Vertigo Releasing.
93 mins. USA. 2023. US Rel: 12 March 2024. UK Rel: 19 April 2024. Cert. 12A.
