Is there a more exhaustively, and exhaustingly, tackled theme in American independent film than grief?
Festival lineups and arthouses are littered with stories — some somber, some quirk-laden — of loss and trauma, mourning and memory, learning to live and love again after the passing of a child, a spouse, a sibling, a parent. Despite sublime exceptions like Manchester by the Sea and Rachel Getting Married, a dispiriting majority are basically cinematic white noise; there’s a numbing, rinse-and-repeat sameness to all the emotional repression, breakthroughs and release. Trying to take a shortcut to our most painful feelings, these films have the contrary effect of activating our defenses or, worse, our indifference.
Luckily, there are portraits of grief that bulldoze past our resistance, and their own shortcomings, thanks to the sheer force of their sincerity. Ghostlight, from Chicago-based writing-directing team Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, is one of them. A dramedy about...
Festival lineups and arthouses are littered with stories — some somber, some quirk-laden — of loss and trauma, mourning and memory, learning to live and love again after the passing of a child, a spouse, a sibling, a parent. Despite sublime exceptions like Manchester by the Sea and Rachel Getting Married, a dispiriting majority are basically cinematic white noise; there’s a numbing, rinse-and-repeat sameness to all the emotional repression, breakthroughs and release. Trying to take a shortcut to our most painful feelings, these films have the contrary effect of activating our defenses or, worse, our indifference.
Luckily, there are portraits of grief that bulldoze past our resistance, and their own shortcomings, thanks to the sheer force of their sincerity. Ghostlight, from Chicago-based writing-directing team Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, is one of them. A dramedy about...
- 1/19/2024
- by Jon Frosch
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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