Can we agree that the casting of Daisy Ridley in the Star Wars reboot was one of the best right calls ever made? My preferences established, can we all also agree that her non-Star Wars choices have often been less than stellar? On to Sometimes I Think About Dying, a reminder of why she was chosen for The Force Awakens and how good she can be with the right material.
In flat grey Oregon, flat grey Fran (Ridley) lives a mouselike existence, creeping every day into her desk job in a run-of-the-mill office, creeping home again after work for a dinner consisting of cottage cheese before settling down for the evening with a puzzle book. After turning in she dreams about being dead, in a forest somewhere, splayed out awkwardly on the ground. Or she’s in a room with a boa constrictor. Or she’s lying dead on a beach.
It looks like things are heading in the direction of the strange Japanese film When I Get Home, My Wife Always Pretends to Be Dead – with Fran as the wife. Or, visions to one side, this might be the filmic equivalent of that Abba song The Day Before You Came, a thumbnail sketch of humdrum desperation.
And then a new guy arrives in the office, Robert (Dave Merheje), very talkative, quite friendly. Fran kind of likes him, it seems. Or at least she thinks he’ll do – Fran’s inner life is a blank, the death scenarios to one side. The two of them go and see a movie together, then embark on a hesitant, glacially slow courtship that consists largely of him talking and her attempting to break out of her shell to meet him somewhere on the spectrum she is obviously on.
Sometimes I Think About Dying is an adaptation of a play called Killers, by Kevin Armento, which became a short directed by Stefanie Abel Horowitz. Both Armento and Horowitz have a writing credits for this full-length adaptation directed with a light skilful touch by Rachel Lambert. She, they, it, the cast, get two things absolutely bang on. The first is the picture it paints of office life – everyday details like cards and collections of money when people are leaving, the hullabaloo around cakes for special occasions, the bright, brassy way office folk interact with each other.
And then there’s a quieter examination of social anxiety seen – the upside (a simple cosy life where your thoughts are never challenged because they’re never shared) and the downside (friendlessness, exclusion, an inability to join in even when you want to).
Lambert and her DP Dustin Lane shoot it flat and drained of colour to match Fran’s life, and Ridley plays Fran as a clenched woman not sure if she wants to unclench. Her face – beautiful from one angle, just ordinarily pretty from another – is perfectly suited to the role, because Fran is being tugged in two directions. Ridley’s acting will jerk a tear, I’m guessing, as Fran realises she’s backed herself so far into her burrow that she’s incapable of behaving normally, with Robert or anyone else.
There is great “normal” acting in this. Merheje as Robert, the guy who nervously fills in all the awkward pauses while he and Fran are out because he knows she’s not going to do it. Marcia DeBonis as co-worker Carol, on the point of retiring and protesting a touch too much about how much she’s looking forward to it. Parvesh Cheena, as Garrett, the likeable co-worker who tells everyone at work he’s vegan when he’s not. Megan Stalter is also particularly good as Isobel, the cringe-inducing boss eager to be liked (see The Office).
It’s the normality of it all that makes it so powerful. This is just a woman with a dull life and a dull job. Robert isn’t much of a catch. He’s not a hero who’s going become Superman to save her. And yet… and yet… from these elements comes a powerful drama about the possibility of transformation. And how we yearn for Fran to transform from duckling to swan, or even to a slightly less anxious duckling. It’s Ridley who makes us yearn. She’s fabulous. It all is.
Sometimes I Think About Dying – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
