It’s just something I think about from time to time.
I think about it, too. Abstractly, at least. More disassociated curiosity than a sinking desire. But it’s there. Floating. Ethereally hanging, suspended in viscous air thick with disquieting yearning. An uneasy longing you can’t quite place. The manifestation of this asocial hollowness. You just wish things were different, really. Thoughts tinged with this distant disparate sense that on some level, something has been misplaced. Something intrinsically broken. The world becomes cold and sterile, alien, impossible. Like your feet are never quite touching the ground. You look around and wonder what it is you’re missing. There’s some part of just existing that seems so much easier for everyone else. Effortless. The easiest thing to do is to just be transparent, quietly incorporeal. You convince yourself there’s nothing of interest you have to say anyway. It becomes numbing, all consuming. Like sinking into plush verdant moss and tumbling through the darkness. The days repeat ad infinitum. An endless, unforgiving crawl. Sometimes, you think about dying.
On depression and crushing social anxiety, on the droning of modern existence and the soft clacking of an incoming Slack message. The chaotic kaleidoscope of asocial loneliness distilled down into a quiet evocation of familiarity. A portrait of solitude with the emanating warmth that maybe you’re not the only one who has suffered this particular kind of numbing emptiness. Rachel Lambert’s coastal Oregon-set Sometimes I Think About Dying is often droning and dull, but there’s an aching realism to it that couldn’t be replicated by anything with more energetic momentum. Soft spoken, small town office worker Fran (Daisy Ridley) wakes up at 6:45. She walks a few blocks through the crisp Pacific Northwest air to work. She sits at her desk and fills out spreadsheets in pensive silence. The office buzzes around her, bubbly coworkers make small talk, bustle around to grab coffee or chat about passing cruise ships. She stares wistfully at the crane floating in the breeze outside the window. She walks home, eats a small dinner with a glass of wine standing at a table in her kitchen. Her mom calls. She doesn’t pick up.
There’s a repetitive mundanity, like the apprehensive monotony that populates Hideaki Anno’s Ritual (2000), an inescapable stasis tinted with a fluorescent buzz of hope, a sense that through all of the drowning isolation that maybe things could get better. Fran just doesn’t know how. A familiar feeling. Always outside looking in, stuck on some invisible barrier that appears so deceptively simple to cross, only every time you step up to it, it becomes completely impenetrable. Try again tomorrow, I suppose. It feels like an exceptionally niche work, one that seems designed to be painted so particularly in its solitude that it could be easily misconstrued as only its surface level soft hum. There is beauty in the droning, a framed understanding of how to extract the tangible intimacy of these complex emotions, conveyed nearly wordlessly and effortlessly through thoughtful composition. Ridley’s performance accomplishes more in silence than it ever could through a dialogue heavy reformation of these same ideas, and even through Fran’s most self-destructively frustrating moments it feels achingly understandable.
The narrative specifics just kind of float through, a simple idea that the right new person intersecting with your path through the cosmos could quietly change everything. Robert (Dave Merheje) sees Fran. Like all the effort to be transparent didn’t matter at all. Like she had always been there. The hardest thing is getting to know someone who doesn’t know themselves. But it only takes a little kindness, and the warmth expands. Suddenly, the world feels less alien. It still takes work, it’s still flooded with this deafening discomfort, like you’re finally experiencing life but you don’t know if you can do it right. But there’s possibility. Hope. Even having something worth crying over is its own cathartic victory over the infinite cold darkness. It’s a beautiful kind of movie for the right kind of person. For those lost in thought.