Sometimes I Think About Dying
In “Sometimes I Think About Dying,” Fran (Daisy Ridley) doesn’t say a word until 22 minutes in. Not one word. What she does say is, to an extreme, matter of fact “I’m Fran. I like cottage cheese.” There’s no why behind it, she’s at an office meeting where everyone has been asked to introduce themselves by sharing their favorite food and we have seen her make a meal out of cottage cheese before now. Everything else about her is a mystery and stays that way because sometimes and it really is only sometimes things just don’t get explained.
Fran lives in the Pacific Northwest, in a small town where she works in an office making spreadsheets all day while her co-workers’ banal conversations ping off the walls around her. She’s mostly invisible to them, despite one of them popping up at her desk later on to ask for help with his own spreadsheet troubles. (The movie gets office jobs so exactly right that it even captures the thrill of someone showing up with donuts for the team.) At night she pours herself a glass of wine, eats some cottage cheese, does Sudoku puzzles until bed. Wash, rinse, repeat.
But Fran has another life. In this life she is dead.
In these visions she sees herself as a corpse in the forest or splayed out on an empty beach as bugs crawl over her body; she imagines being hung from a crane or having her neck snapped by falling off something tall enough to break it against on the way down. These thoughts are suicidal, yes, but they are not self destructive not fully intentional at least when it comes right down to killing herself anyway because there doesn’t actually seem to be any point behind any one thing or another so why bother trying anymore if nothing means anything ever since always forevermore amen hallelujah amen? The movie does not explain this either.
Into this fugue state of fantasizing about her own death comes a new person in the office, Robert (Dave Merheje), who is an extrovert and a charmer. He has no preconceived notions about her; he doesn’t treat her like she’s invisible. They go to the movies. They go out for pie after. They get invited to a party where everyone plays a murder mystery game and Fran actually talks and participates she tends toward the literal, not really “getting” jokes or nuance but he’s intrigued anyway and likes it. Her death visions are now humorously interrupted by visions of him.
It’s unclear what happens next or what happened before any of this or if anything will ever happen again because sometimes two plus two equals four just isn’t good enough for us even though we’re also always begging for someone to tell us why. It is one of the principles on which “Sometimes I Think About Dying,” directed with an eye toward intrigue by Rachel Lambert, operates most successfully. That and it keeps going.
The shots of the town aren’t used as transitional second-unit material this beautiful environment with its dusks and river and rain-wet roads and circling birds is woven into the narrative itself, showing up right in the middle of scenes almost like they’re coming from inside Fran’s dissociated perspective on life so no wonder everything looks so weird all that time spent staring at screens indoors makes sense now doesn’t it? Same goes for Fran’s house. The decor looks like 1954, there are floral-patterned armchairs in front of a china cabinet did she inherit this place from her grandmother or what? Who knows?
Ridley does a good job of not falling into the traps of writing a character like Fran. Though Fran is rarely talkative, she is not shy. Ridley avoids overdoing her “quirkiness”; she remains believably abstracted, as if barely being coaxed out of her death-wish fantasy life to speak with the person right in front of her. Fran, in Ridley’s hands, is not simply a bundle of Awkward Lonely Girl clichés, she’s an enigma. Also Robert (Merheje) is wonderful. He seems like a real guy someone who senses others and savors moments and moves through the world with sociable ease. It’s somewhat strange that such a mostly silent woman would draw him out, and I appreciate that the film declines to account for any of this, but one more “act” might be nice here. It’s an unfinished bridge. The movie makes a bid toward catharsis eventually, though there isn’t nearly enough information to carry us across that river. And so we dangle.
This dangling quality may have something to do with its origins as a story. “Sometimes I Think About Dying” was written by Stefanie Abel Horowitz, Kevin Armento and Katy Wright Mead, it was directed by Horowitz from a 2019 award-winning short film (also directed by Horowitz) based on Armento’s 2013 play “Killers,” which presented two unrelated yet interlocking tales one about someone who dreams of dying, another about someone else who dreams of dying that the film adaptation here has boiled down into just the first item on that list. This might be why it feels incomplete. The gaps are captivating, but two plus two doesn’t quite equal four.
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