SUNDANCE 2023 | Movie Review: "Sometimes I Think About Dying"; Imagined Death in the Pacific Northwest

Fran likes spreadsheets, cottage cheese, and occasionally falling into thoughts of her own imagined death scenarios—though she probably won’t tell you about that last part. With the way she behaves like wallpaper at her office job, you get the sense that she hasn’t told anyone any part of her life.

Rachel Lambert’s sophomore feature, Sometimes I Think About Dying—a full-length adaptation of the 2019 Sundance short of the same name, directed by Stefanie Abel Horowitz—is a quaint and subdued work of drone-core about an introverted and somewhat insular single woman. It’s a film that sees star Daisy Ridley dialing back and dialing in to more pensive character work. Not unlike Jennifer Lawrence is last year’s Causeway, Ridley has traded out sci-fi spectacle and elaborate costuming for meditative mundanity and drab, muted-colour outfits. She plays Fran with rigidity, reticence, and an air of enigmatic ennui, trudging around her nondescript office space and her sleepy port town on the Oregon coast whilst naturally evading most all social encounters. But what do you know: her fondness for Excel files and cheese that isn’t technically cheese (that’s right, cottage cheese is actually a curd), is precisely what will compel her to an affable new office colleague, Robert (Canadian comedian Dave Merheje).

Image courtesy of Sundance Institute.

What follows are Fran’s tentative (first?) steps into the casual dating world, a process naturally—sometimes comically—impeded by her tendency to withhold. Ridley and Merheje play off each other in effortless and endearing fashion, even if the “playing” isn’t all that lively, while their dialogue elicits consistent chuckles. Most of these chuckles come out of our nervous familiarity with cloying small talk, but for many of us caught in 9-to-5’s and prone to our cynical dismissals of workplace cohorts, small talk is what we inevitably come around to. Unless you’re particularly embittered, this film’s commitment to mining pathos from groan-worthy small talk is what will probably make you “come around” to it in the end, too. Sure, we can work to divorce ourselves from “feeling” anything—for our jobs and for our coworkers—but if we are to be cooped up with the same tasks and the same people for eight hours a day, it becomes essential to our existence to start feeling something. Anything.

This is the essential trajectory of Fran’s story, though her thoughts of expiring are peppered throughout to disrupt some expected rhythms, Played not for the sake of morbidity or shock, Fran’s thoughts instead work as Kaufman-eque expressions of Fran’s unique psyche, and while some of them end up feeling throwaway in the way they aren’t dwelt on, their somewhat fantastical production design still works to impress on one some compelling imagery. In many ways, these instances are what speak for the terminally quiet Fran. Fran is also given some voice with composer Dabney Morris’ surprisingly fantastical score, which evokes a strange idea of a fairytale, and make one consider death not as grim fate, but as escape.

But why exactly does Fran ponder or crave escape? Sometimes I Think About Dying is stubbornly opaque when it comes to these details. A film need not go into longwinded exposition when it comes to an individual’s malaise—sometimes, depression is just there, and sometimes, we can infer that referring to an aspect of life as “fine” means quite the opposite. Still, I couldn’t help but want more out of Fran, just as Robert does. This frustration further led me to ponder this film’s pacing issues, which make themselves glaringly apparent in the film’s middle section. If the indie film trope of forcing you to sit with characters on terribly uneventful dates hasn’t charmed you at this point, don’t expect it to in this film. And speaking of indie film tropes, the character of Robert is, of course, a film nerd (he even has the Blue Velvet soundtrack on CD).

Touches like this may charm festival audiences, but where Lambert’s film will land with the larger public is hard to say. But lest I end this review on a sour note, Sometimes I Think About Dying should be admired for its sensitive depiction loneliness, its brilliantly nuanced work by Ridley, and its somewhat unique tone of tedium delirium. If nothing else, the film will have you very excited to see what Ridley, now sporting a producer credit, helps think of next.