"Three Sacks Full of Hats"; Wading in the Thick of it All

10/12 ForReel Score | 4/5 Stars

The world can seem muted when your personal life is thrown into turmoil. It can seem blurred. It can disappear, especially as you retract further into yourself and your trauma and your grief. Three Sacks Full of Hats, directed by Debbie Anzalone, is a short film that simmers in this sort of emotional stasis, lets its lens well up with tears, and meditates.

Our story concerns Mick (Warren Brown, who you may recognize from Luther), a thirty-something man returned to his seaside hometown in England to reconcile with his dying brother (Tom Meetan), who slowly succumbs to an illness brought on by alcohol abuse. He also meets his mum (Alison Steadman) and his dad (David Sterne), the latter of which may have been enabling his brother through years of “the drink.”

Like many of these closely observed, personally-charged short films, Anzalone keeps her characters tightly framed and softly lit, drowning out the world around them and suffusing them with ennui. They are too absorbed in each other and themselves to let other petty concerns seep in. Breaking up these scenes in the family home and the hospital are breathing moments where Mick wanders his hometown alone and in deep thought. Only during these moments does this film open up to include landscapes, scenery, and atmosphere. At first, I took these scenes as lazy attempts at eliciting empathy in the viewer—the old trope of the isolated figure looking off into the distance as they sort through their feelings—but as I reflected and re-watched, I recognized my own experiences with coping. Sometimes we all just need to take a walk and breathe. (Maybe we do this because we see it depicted in films so often?)

The acting talents in this film are immense, with all four members of the ensemble cast turning in deeply affecting performances. Steadman’s performance, in particular, is so achingly sweet you’ll want to call your mother as soon as the film ends. This is a film that finds most of its footing and resonance when it strikes a personal cord with its viewers, but with its deeply felt story and universal themes of grief and emotional barriers, you’ll be surprised at how quickly this cord reveals itself.