Daisy Ridley stars as an office worker who’s just going through the motions.
Fran thinks about dying, but not gruesomely. Her mental tableaux of death look as if they were staged by the artist Gregory Crewdson. Sometimes her body is draped dramatically over driftwood on a serene beach or posed in a foggy forest on a soft green bed of moss. She imagines standing alone in a nondescript finished office basement as a giant snake slithers by. She imagines death, essentially, as peace in the midst of ever-changing nature.
Her reality is less beautifully hued. By day, Fran (Daisy Ridley) dons drab business casual and works in the sort of space that makes the environs of “The Office” seem like a magical wonderland. A small group of people perform clerical tasks to keep the local port in their tiny Pacific Northwest town running smoothly, and spend most of their time on crushingly banal chatter. Why is this cruise ship docked in such a way that it blocks the views of the mountains? Where are the mugs?
By night, Fran’s life isn’t much more interesting, but at least she’s in control of it. She goes home, pours a glass of wine and takes a long, restorative sip, then reheats some kind of insipid patty and eats it with a side of cottage cheese. Sudoku, brush teeth, bed, repeat. It feels like she’s starring in her own one-woman play, one where all other people are background noise — her mother’s phone call goes to voice mail — and nobody is watching.
“Sometimes I Think About Dying,” directed by Rachel Lambert, comes by its theatricality naturally; it’s based, in part, on the play “Killers” by Kevin Armento. (The other credited writers are Stefanie Abel Horowitz and Katy Wright-Mead, the latter of whose credits include “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Knick.”) The play entwined the tale of a young woman who thinks about dying with a secondary story about a young woman obsessed with killing, and though I haven’t seen it, I assume that means its themes were very different. But onscreen, “Sometimes I Think About Dying” can do what it could never do as easily onstage: We float in and out of Fran’s mind, entering her mood, her lethargy, her fixations on the back of people’s heads or their mouths while they speak. We start to become a little bit Fran.
Perhaps the best term for Fran’s persistent mood is acedia, that feeling of not caring much about anything, especially one’s position in the world. (Ancient monks called it the “noonday demon.”) It’s often equated with depression, but there’s a particular torpor provoked by a soul-sucking office that can bring it on. Many a new college graduate has discovered, quickly, that a 9-to-5 job can become unbearable even if the work itself is simple, pleasant and well-paid. Something about the prospect of everlasting sameness can sap the will to live.
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Source: Movies - nytimes.com