Do you guys ever think about dying?

Daisy Ridley does in Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023)

It’s summer blockbuster season, which means it’s time for me to lean even further into my favorite genre: Nothing Happens Cinema. And nothing I’ve seen lately has embodied Nothing Happens Cinema quite like Sometimes I Think About Dying, a film that’s very difficult to Google (the first time I tried, Google just gave me a bunch of websites about self-harm…you HAVE to add the word "movie” to your search!). The film begins with shots of nature: cars driving across a bridge. Fruit rolling down the street. A gloomy, solid gray sky. In those opening shots, I relaxed. I was in good hands. Hands where a human failure to connect would be the most dramatic thing happening…which, to be fair, is ultimately pretty dramatic!

Daisy Ridley plays Fran, a woman who works in an office that will feel familiar to anyone who has ever worked in an office. She…does stuff with spreadsheets. You know, office stuff. We see her wake up alone in her bed, get ready for the day, walk to work, sit at her desk with extremely minimal interactions with her coworkers, go home and eat some weird microwaved thing with cottage cheese on it (seriously I watched this scene twice and I can’t figure out if she’s eating a meat patty or some sort of muffin situation), ignore a call from her mom, play Sudoku, and go to bed. She repeats this sequence several times, the only difference being the conversations of her coworkers around her. She’s not part of these conversations—she’s just beside them, overhearing them as she sits at her computer or gets something from the break room. In that way, we feel like eavesdroppers, too, like we’re listening in on the mundane, sometimes funny, sometimes annoying conversations of the people who spend eight hours together every day.

And man, if that’s not ever what it was like for me to work in an office. I have a card on my bulletin board that reads “Being an artist is like being yourself for a living,” and while that sentiment does make me cringe a little (am I an artist? Am I being myself or am I working to create a totally made-up world?), I have it up because part of it rings true. In my job as a writer, I don’t feel a lot of anxiety around who I am and I don’t spend a ton of time wondering if I’m ultimately too weird to even exist on this earth…because writers are very weird people. I mean that in a good way and a bad one. Having a job where I already have one HUGE point of connection with everyone I talk to (books) has made conversation much easier and provided me with a sense of ease in my life that I didn’t think was even possible for me.

Back when I worked in an office, I was uncomfortable all the time. This isn’t something I could or would want to blame on the people I worked with. Whether it was at my not-a-good-fit-for-me manufacturing job or my a-very-good-fit-for-me nonprofit writing job, my coworkers were almost uniformly lovely people. Of course, there are always outliers in any job…sometimes I think that might actually be part of the fun of working in an office, just the idea of having that one rude guy who you can all band together about and be like, “Did you guys HEAR what JOSH said???”

But ultimately, every second of my time in an office was spent trying very hard to appear “normal.” I don’t know why, but I was stymied by basic conversation in a way that I certainly don’t feel now. I was constantly worried that people were going to think I was weird, or that they already did think I was weird and were quietly avoiding me, and that I would be fired any second for the punishable offense of being Just Too Weird. Surprisingly, this didn’t lead to me easily making friends. It was something that snowballed…once you start out being “quiet girl who just kind of stays at her desk,” it’s hard to transition into “girl who is fun and wants to hear about your weekend!!!”

It didn’t help that I’ve always been worried I’m inherently asocial and will die alone (“oh, so we’re getting right into it this week”-you). My mom is a person who makes friends in every situation she goes into, whether it’s the parents’ club at school or an all-women’s gym or a terrible work environment. She spends her retirement volunteering at multiple places and joining book clubs. Once I said to her, “You know how sometimes you go somewhere and you’re just like, oh I don’t fit in here at all,” and she said, very seriously, “I’ve never felt that way in my life.” I cannot emphasize how much my childhood shyness and my lifelong anxiety has stymied my mom. It’s just not how she lives.

My dad, meanwhile, is Ron Swanson.

My dad has one (1) friend from high school and he sees that friend when he’s in town. Otherwise he does not socialize. He would never, and I mean literally never, join a club. He only wants to hang out with his family and he doesn’t need anyone else. He loves watching movies by himself in the basement, and Alex once joked that the best gift we could give him would be a second basement underneath the first basement so he could get even further underground to watch his movies alone.

It’s a real “inside you there are two wolves” situation. I think of myself as an overall friendly person. I’m very good at customer service and talking on the phone (not to brag, but longtime readers may remember that once, as a temp, I stole a full-time receptionist job from a narcoleptic rude lady because I was much better at handling the phone than she was…a story for another time if you don’t remember that one, I suppose). I love getting out of the house and meeting people, and doing events is one of the most fun parts of my job.

And yet. I also know how withdrawn I can get. I know that I isolate myself when anxious. I know how I acted when I worked in an office, purposely keeping myself apart from everyone even though I didn’t fully know why. And so seeing Fran keep herself apart from her coworkers felt uncomfortably close. Everyone else talks to each other with ease about their jobs, other coworkers, their surroundings, their weekends…but that’s not available to Fran.

And then a new employee shows up: Robert. In a meeting, their boss (played brilliantly by Meg Stalter, always so funny even in the smallest role) asks everyone to go around and name their favorite food as an icebreaker. This scene made me break out in a cold sweat because I hate icebreaker activities. I used to panic over my answers as a kid because I wanted to make sure I said something “normal” (oh, we’re sensing a theme here!). Anyway, Fran says “My name is Fran and I like cottage cheese,” which is the most she’s said up to this point. The reaction of her coworkers is so accurate and funny (little mutters of “I forgot about cottage cheese”) and apparently this answer plus looking like Daisy Ridley is enough to get Robert interested in her because the next thing you know, they’re going to a movie and out for pie.

Robert is one of those people who gets along easily with everyone, which is perhaps why he’s trying so hard to crack Fran’s shell. He gets an invitation to a party from the waitress, and meanwhile Fran just says “no” when he asks her if she liked the movie. When pressed, she says “I didn’t like anything about it.” Two things about our girl Fran: she’s not afraid to be honest and she’s terrible at conversation!

Nothing about Fran’s inner life shows on the outside—she doesn’t tell us that her night out with Robert made a big impact on her, but it’s clear that it did from the way she looks his way in the office or the way she lingers, clearly hoping to talk to him, when she’s avoiding everyone else. She looks at the empty side of her bed and you can feel her thinking about what it might be like to have another person there.

It might be good, but also, it might be unpleasant. Because Fran, even though she doesn’t seem to fully understand why, is pushing Robert away the same way she’s kept herself apart from her coworkers. She’s not just putting up walls; she is a wall. It feels deliberate, not like an omission, that we don’t know much about Fran other than her job and her apartment. When Robert presses her for more details about her life, her only answer is, “It’s not that interesting.” We’re as curious as he is! Why are her nights spent alone? Why does she ignore her mom’s calls? She says once that she grew up in the area, which surprises those around her because she seems to have no connections. What’s going on there? We don’t know! In so many films (Twilight, Fifty Shades, Eileen, Carol), a brunette woman is a blank character for us to project ourselves onto until a charismatic billionaire/vampire/blonde woman shows up to whisk her into a life of romance, glamour, or crime.

But we don’t project ourselves onto Fran. Fran is blank and she remains blank. We see her cry once after a particularly disastrous encounter with Robert, one where he begs to get to know her and asks, “Why is it so hard with you?” and she responds by saying something cruel. She goes home and sobs on the floor of her empty apartment, one of our only clues that she does yearn for connection, even if she can’t seem to open herself up to it.

This is a quiet movie, so it isn’t one that’s going to end with a big romantic resolution or Fran suddenly befriending her entire office. There is no grand gesture—this isn’t a rom-com. Instead, she takes the (colossal, for her) step of bringing in donuts and all of her coworkers are so happy. As she’s forced to be more present and engaged, Fran learns (and we learn) that the people around us are, mostly, kind. Their petty problems are usually not personal. They do want to get to know us, or at least they want to have a conversation.

And she does, in her own awkward Fran way, apologize to Robert in a scene that is so quiet yet so painful that it almost made me cry. “Do you wish you could unknow me?” she asks, the most honest words she’s spoken the entire film, and you can feel how much it pains her to be this vulnerable, even though she knows she has to be.

Robert’s response is both true and heartbreaking: “I don’t know you,” he says. But we get the feeling that, maybe, Fran is ready to let herself be slightly more known. Or at least she’s ready to bring in donuts once in awhile.

This isn’t a movie for everyone, but it is a movie for my fellow Nothing Happens Cinema enthusiasts. It’s an antidote (or maybe just a counterpoint if you don’t feel like being so dramatic) to summer action movies where so much stuff is constantly happening. This is a movie that dares to ask: what if the biggest thing that happens is a person seeking forgiveness? What is we simply want to watch a piece of fruit roll down the street or overhear a mundane office conversation? And, frankly, that’s what I always want out of a film.

Sometimes I Think About Dying can be rented online and it looks like it’s now available for free on Kanopy, which means I’ll be watching it again soon. I watched it on Mubi, one of the few streaming services we actually don’t have, because Alex told me I would like it and then forced me to watch it by sending me a free two-day Mubi pass. It’s nice to have people in your life who know your tastes so well and also have the ability to give you a free Mubi trial. And NOW Mubi wants to give me a free month so…we’ll see how long I can resist until I end up paying for this one, too. I pledged to avoid Peacock and look how that turned out (actually fine, Hollis got a very good deal for Black Friday, but all I’m saying is I swore we’d never get it and look at us now! Watching the Olympics constantly!).

I have a fun extra PAID post coming up soon that contains some of my unpopular opinions. You know, the stuff that must remain behind a paywall. See you soon. xo