Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023)
Directed by Rachel Lambert
It’s an unseasonably cold day in November 2018. It’s after an unseasonably warm Thanksgiving that I spent mostly alone, watching films that have faded away into the ether of my mind. I’m seeing Maya. We’re commuting home from work, drifting into darkness in our big winter coats, with the sun receding by the four o’clock hour. I’m traveling from Hyde Park to Ravenswood. As we’re waiting for a delayed northbound Red Line train, she asks, “have you ever thought about jumping?” It was a surprising question at the time and I don’t remember my response. But I do remember her reply.
Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying is familiar in tone and tenor. It’s a song I’ve heard before, a poem of despair, malaise, and most surprisingly, hope. Fran (Daisy Ridley) works in a nondescript, painfully neutral office in a small PNW town. She’s quiet, prone to daydreaming in the office, where, as the title suggests, she imagines her death. As someone from the office is retiring, she lets herself become interested in the new hire, Robert (Dave Merheje). Robert rattles the office ecosystem, where he invites Fran out to a movie. For much of the opening passages of the film, we rarely hear Fran speak. Her most common turn of phrase is to state that she’s sorry for whatever minor inconvenience her presence may have. Fran lingers in the background, goes home and eats alone, does her sudoku puzzles, and retires to bed, alone. She doesn’t think she’s interesting and she keeps quiet because she doesn’t think she has anything interesting to say. Robert doesn’t believe that to be the case. He’s right, but Fran doesn’t believe him.
“All the time,” said Maya. It had been about eight years since my first suicide attempt and the thought of hurling myself in front of a train was not at the forefront of my frontal lobe. That would come later. We’d part ways during the commute, where I returned to my half-empty apartment, adjusting to a new lifestyle of solitude. These moments were necessary but difficult, where I had to become comfortable with the isolation, where I had to accept that not all silences could be filled with music or movies or passionate affairs. Instead, I had to accept the discomfort with dignity. Not to say that it was always dignified, per se, but I survived it. I survived the darker aspects of myself.
Lambert’s stylistic approach reminded me of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love blended with Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves. There’s an unsettling whimsy to certain sequences, where Lambert leans into the milieu, relying on the frequent overcast days to inform an encroaching sense of dread to come. She also observes some particularly moving moments from Dave Merheje, an unknown to me, who possesses a kind of everyman schlub energy that’s convincing in part because so much of his part feels impromptu and improvisational. Meanwhile, Ridley is crushing, where we visibly see her let her guard down in calculated increments. I cheered her on for those moments of openness, only to be met by the familiar sense of hostility that comes with not being used to being vulnerable. Ridley gets it and her character here embodies all the contradictions that come with feeling lonely and the frustration of not knowing what to do about it.
I’d come within a few inches of losing my life to a barreling train. Twice. Again, it hasn’t always been dignified. And while I didn’t have a neat and pat conclusion to get my head back above ground (in Lambert’s film, a chance encounter at a coffee shop lends itself to a cosmic awakening), I can say that Sometimes I Think About Dying expresses a candid sense of the circumstances and work it takes to hoist oneself out of despair. I’ve thought and lived through all the remedies to depression and I can’t offer any sage advice other than it takes a village; no one ever said you had to go it alone and while the thought of asking for help can seem like a death in of itself, it ended up being what saved me. It took many times, teetering on all the edges of collapse, before I found the Earth to plant my feet. Same could be said for Fran. Imagine the same could be said for a lot of people.
I don’t think about jumping in front of trains anymore.