Sometimes I Think About Dying Review
Fran (Daisy Ridley) likes cottage cheese. And spreadsheets. And… that’s about it really. It’s not very much to fill a life, so she spends a lot of time having ornate, picturesque fantasies about her death, as her co-workers around her spend their days arguing about office supplies and pining for baked goods. Their small talk is a language she does not speak.
But then Robert (Dave Merheje) starts at the office. Whereas the rest of her colleagues treat Fran much as they would a desk lamp or a potted plant, Robert immediately engages with her, taking the time to drag her out of her shell. Sometimes I Think About Dying charts Fran’s gradual entry into the world.
For someone who still hadn’t quite established themselves as an interesting actor outside of the juggernaut that is the Star Wars franchise, Daisy Ridley could not have made a better choice than this tiny, quiet indie from multi-hyphenate Rachel Lambert. So much of Sometimes I Think About Dying rests on Ridley’s interiority. There’s a very long time before Fran says anything substantive in the movie; most of her dialogue consists of replies to pleasantries thrown her way. Instead, we watch her watching everybody else, alternating between annoyance and fascination at the way the others at her office seem to know so easily how to interact; wanting to join them, and wanting to run home and sleep away the rest of the day. Ridley makes Fran’s inner life ever palpable, to the extent you might find yourself quietly whispering words of encouragement to her through the screen as she seems so close to making a breakthrough. It’s a lovely, engaging turn, and bodes well for her filmic future.
From a narrative perspective, Sometimes I Think About Dying can be boiled down to: two dates, a party, a meeting, an unexpected encounter at a coffee shop, and an awful lot of office small talk. It’s not exactly the stuff of high-octane adventure, but one of the most interesting things about the movie is how often it renders the mundane terrifying – this is a film for the introverted, through and through. When Fran gets passed a leaving card for a colleague she barely knows, her struggle to come up with something to write down, squeezed in between the other rapturous messages, becomes titanic. For an ice-breaker as Robert’s introduction, all the office workers have to introduce themselves and say their favourite food. For a certain type of person, that’s nothing. For Fran though, and for the rest of us introverts, it’s a lot – you can almost hear her heart beating faster as it gets closer to being her turn.
Yet just as little things can be scary for Fran, they can also light her up. When someone’s felt as isolated from the world as she, a casual compliment, or even just being included in a round of small talk, means so much. A kind person taking the time to get to know you, even if your awkwardness and the walls you’ve built up make it hard for them, means the world.
Between Ridley’s performance and Rachel Lambert’s sensitive, delicate direction, Sometimes I Think About Dying elevates the day-to-day minutiae of life to the level of the extraordinary. And it’s beautiful.
★★★★★
