2025 Top Ten List #2 Die My Love

 

Director Lynne Ramsay

Ramsay on the set with Jennifer Lawrence

Jennifer Lawrence

Lawrence, Ramsay, and Robert Pattinson

Lawrence and Pattinson 

Cannes press conference

novelist Ariana Harwicz

DIE MY LOVE          A                                                                                                            Great Britain  USA  Canada  (118 mi)  2025  d: Lynne Ramsay

I’m stuck between wanting to do something, and not wanting to do anything at all.                    —Grace (Jennifer Lawrence)

This film was a fuckin’ monster, and could certainly leave viewers perplexed, receiving mixed scores at Cannes when it premiered (Cannes Film Festival 2025 jury grid), perhaps coming as no surprise that its arthouse darkness has divided audiences, though this is an extensively re-edited version than what played at Cannes, where she only had 5 days to edit before the festival screening.  Nobody makes movies like this anymore, as no one else seems to have the guts to try, having nothing in common with what you see in mainstream movie theaters, where all you see in theaters today, on streaming platforms, or even at film festivals is relatively generic filmmaking, yet this is as bold, abstract, and ferociously artistic as they come, made by the reassuring hand of a filmmaker who literally inhabits the fractured, psychological mindset of an alienated female character likely suffering from postpartum depression following childbirth (a phrase never mentioned in the film), revealing just how suffocating her life and marriage become after childbirth.  Much like the character, viewers have no chance to escape, yet that’s simply the backdrop for what is ultimately an off-the-rails crazy love story, taking us along for a wild ride, where we feel like we’ve been on an epic adventure, like Odysseus in The Odyssey, where there’s nothing sugar coated about it.  This is a film that invites us to walk in her shoes, not diagnose her problem, or figure out a cure, just identify with the unknown mystery within.  Impossible to believe any man on the planet could make this film, though the closest may be John Cassavetes exploring the emotionally exhaustive mood swings of Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), or Ingmar Bergman writing for Liv Ullman, who was pregnant in real-life with the director’s child in Persona (1966), with actress Jennifer Lawrence offering a raw and explosive performance that defies belief, claiming women directors aren’t over-controlling and don’t “overdirect” like male directors typically do (Jennifer Lawrence Says Female Directors Don't ...), suggesting Lynne Ramsay was the opposite of that, describing her as an instinctual director, working without an ego, acutely observational, using music on the set, and “very emotionally led.”  Can’t really say this is better than RATCATCHER (1999) and MORVERN CALLAR (2002), two of her best, but its sprawling canvas is equally as impressive in its fiercely original style of filmmaking.  Putting this in context, Ramsay’s other works are short films Small Deaths (Lynne Ramsay, 1996) - YouTube (11:13) and GASMAN (1997), Lynne Ramsay's 1970s Christmas in Scotland - YouTube (14:18), along with features We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), and 2018 Top Ten List #2 You Were Never Really Here (2017), where every one is extraordinary, but this one contains a relentlessly bold spirit that dares viewers to come along for an intentionally disorienting journey, literally imposing a woman’s troubling mindset into the theater, where it’s hard not to be affected by the frontal assault to the senses.  This is liberated filmmaking, actually filmed in Calgary, Canada, about as out of the way a place for a Scottish filmmaker to go, sadly losing her mother just days before the Cannes screening (her 8th visit!), whose works are marked by a fascination with children, young people and mothers, and a loss of innocence, as well as the recurring themes of alienation, grief, guilt, death, and its aftermath, with Ramsay collaborating with British guitarist and songwriter George Vjestica (a member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) to provide the musical score.  The film is marked by long periods of tedium where nothing much happens, followed by moments of unanticipated intensity that literally shock viewers into seeing and experiencing something they’d never imagine on their own, which is the beauty of Ramsay’s filmmaking, as it continually lives on the edge, typically eliciting career-best performances out of her actors (think Samantha Morton, Tilda Swinton, Joaquin Phoenix, and now Jennifer Lawrence).  By the way, this film would drastically lose much of its combustible power if seen on a smaller screen, as this is designed with a theater experience in mind.   

The film is an adaptation by Irish playwright Enda Walsh, British playwright Alice Birch, and Scottish filmmaker Ramsay of the eponymous 120-page novel Matate, Amor by Argentinian author Ariana Harwicz, one of the most radical figures in contemporary Argentinian literature, first published in 2012, using a surrealist, stream-of-consciousness format following a woman in rural France who experiences a mental breakdown after having a child, struggling with isolation, motherhood, and intense emotions, described as a “powerful mosaic of the mind.”  It's impossible to come out unscathed from this film, never explaining the state of emergency of its protagonist, where a woman is battling her demons, embracing exclusion yet wanting to belong, craving freedom while feeling trapped, yearning for family life but wanting to burn the entire house down, feeling ever more stifled and repressed, always on the verge of madness, at one point jumping into a pool filled with children in just her underwear, where it’s as if she experiences over-stimulation from the surrounding environment, with the director using visceral cinematic language to express the crushing reality of domestic life through the use of close-ups, fractured scenes, sensory imagery, and an overly intrusive sound design, such as the baby's cry, the world’s most annoying dog barking relentlessly, or sex and silence bleeding into one another.  Blurring the lines between reality and sensory overload, where it’s impossible to know how much of this is real and how much exists only in the imagination, yet that’s the real beauty of this particular film, as there are flashbacks and hallucinations, with an erratic, stream-of-consciousness narrative providing a window into her crumbling state of mind, always teetering on the edge of reality, reminiscent of Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski’s mind-altering REPULSION (1965), occasionally lashing out violently, where you often suspect it’s imagined, but the cuts on her face afterwards tell us all we need to know.  Bruising and confrontational, yet anchored in an unapologetic beauty and lyricism, Ramsay has crafted a unique sensory experience that may take some viewers by surprise, especially considering a familiarity with this actress, as Jennifer Lawrence is someone we’ve grown up with, breaking onto the scene in Debra Granik’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #3 Winter's Bone (2010), followed by David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook (2012), where she won a Best Actress Oscar when she was just 22 years of age, famously tripping going up the stairs to the stage to accept her award, American Hustle (2013), and Joy (2015), as well as Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017), where she has literally stolen our hearts with the exceptional nature of her performances.  But this is something else altogether, a blatant protest against conventionality that can be disorienting and brutal, as one moment she’s lucid and calm, while the next is sheer chaos and confusion, moving effortlessly between banality and eruptions of extreme explosiveness that seemingly come out of nowhere, where this is a director that refuses to pander to the audience, beginning as a painter, and then a photographer, described by British film critic Mark Kermode as “combining the visual poetry of Robert Bresson with the down-to-earth grit of Ken Loach, and the ecstasy of pure cinema.”  Jennifer Lawrence revealed she was about four months pregnant when shooting began, adding an unfiltered layer of rawness and emotional authenticity to her performance, with Stephanie Zacharek from Time magazine aptly describing it as “the kind of performance you go to the movies for.”

Part dark psychological thriller and part black comedy, the storyline is simple and ambiguously understated, turning uniquely complex, accentuated by the power of the performances.  Beautifully shot on 35mm by Irish cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, who the director has worked with before, emphasizing color and texture, and produced by Martin Scorsese, who brought the book to the attention of Jennifer Lawrence’s company Excellent Cadaver, who in turn brought it to Lynne Ramsay.  At the outset of the film we see a New York City couple arriving to a remote location in rural Montana, entering an empty dilapidated home filled with old wallpaper, with Jennifer Lawrence as Grace, a writer meant to be working on a book, accompanying her musician wannabe partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson), both free spirits exhibiting an unleashed animalistic energy between them, like the erotically charged wrestling scene in the Lindsay Anderson drama IF (1968), doing plenty of drinking and dancing, having plenty of uninhibited sex, where this was his childhood home, vacated by a deceased relative who shot himself, though still filled with haunting memories.  This family home provides the foundation for the narrative, surrounded by forests and grasslands, as it’s a world where nature continually intrudes, much like Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), where the mysterious allure of beauty also eludes to signs of impending danger, like being stuck in the Overlook Hotel of Stephen King’s The Shining.  That unrestrained lifestyle all changes with the birth of a child, as their lives start falling apart.  While there are surreal family scenes in their new home that are mysteriously strange, with Sissy Spacek from Robert Altman’s equally unfathomable 3 Women (1977) as Jackson’s mother Pam, who sleeps with a loaded rifle after the death of her husband (an equally traumatic event), and informs Grace “Everybody goes a little loopy the first year,” DIE MY LOVE | Official Clip #3 | In Theaters November | With ... YouTube (1:30), and Nick Nolte as Jackson’s eccentric, dementia-suffering father Harry (before his passing), who wants everybody cleared out of his brother’s house, thinking he’s still living there, eliciting a claustrophobic feeling of being trapped, as if the world is closing in on them.  Yet there’s also a prevalent use of symbolism, as outside, for instance, horses run free, a poetic sign of transcendence in Tarkovsky’s ANDREI RUBLEV (1966), and a connection to the primal instincts of the natural world, where one of the most powerful scenes has the couple arguing in the car while riding through the forest and unexpectedly crashing into one of those beautiful animals, with the soundtrack cutting to 60’s rock supergroup Cream singing a live version of “Crossroads” CREAM Crossroads 1968 YouTube (4:48) in the immediate aftermath, a song choice that targets people of a certain age, where it’s like an anthem to lost youth, now living only in our memories.  Yet one thing is clear, violence, the imagining of it, the physical infliction of it, and its effect on the psyche, is what dominates this film.  After childbirth, something is not right with Grace, seeing everything that is normal as imprisoning, making her feel like a caged animal, where the only place she can feel free is in the forest next to her house, often retreating there in unexpected moments, even going on long walks with the baby carriage, where it’s not the baby that she feels disconnected to, it’s everything else.  Where once she had a healthy sexual appetite, now their sex life is almost nonexistent, an essential part of her life that is lost after the baby is born, and while Jackson is sympathetic, he doesn’t really understand what she’s going through and his despair is evident, becoming aloof and distant, not around when she needs him, often away on the road for work, leaving her to contend with her own demons, with growing suspicions that he’s cheating on her, DIE MY LOVE | Official Clip | In Theaters November | With ...  YouTube (2:06).

Bleak and unflinching, an extended meditation on life and death that seem to endlessly torment this woman, it walks the line between the interior and the exterior, bringing the viewer inside a mind spiraling out of control, taking us to some dark places, offering a kind of voyeuristic filmmaking, as the viewer watches Grace from the outside, unable to penetrate her troubled mind, creating an unsettling sense of intimacy and distance, Die, My Love clip official from Cannes Film Festival 2025 YouTube (1:43).  LaKeith Stanfield as Karl plays an interesting role as a largely unseen neighbor who constantly rides by the house on his motorcycle, feeling completely imaginary, like a character seen from a distance luridly playing out in her head, coming across like Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s mid-19th century novel Wuthering Heights (Arnold) (2011), having a sexual affair, part of the unrestrained demons screaming for freedom inside, an example of how she bottles up pressure and frustration.  For instance, Lawrence has a lot of nudity in this film, but very little sexual release, just another part of a woman’s overall frustration, finding it impossible to blend in with the world around her, where she’s not afraid to be unlikable, or to shed her inhibitions, yet she remains off-limits, positively refusing help from others, as they remain outside her personal orbit, DIE MY LOVE | Official Clip #2 | In Theaters November | With ... YouTube (1:37).  There’s a positively brilliant use of the John Prine song sung with Iris DeMent, “In Spite of Ourselves,” John Prine and Iris DeMent - In Spite of Ourselves (Live From ... YouTube (5:04), which was heard recently in Celine Song’s Materialists (2025), but this one beautifully accentuates the deeply flawed and exposed vulnerabilities of the dysfunctional romantic couple besieged by a neverending series of problems, where at least for this one tender musical moment, it’s easy to feel sympathetic for them both.  Perhaps the most common element in all of Ramsay’s films is the extraordinary use of music, especially her song choices, which are completely in sync with what she’s psychologically trying to say with her visual style, exhibiting a superlative gift of composition, where her innovative cinema is like an impressionistic collage of submerged emotions bursting through the surface, where you never know what’s going to happen, and you may take issue with how she does it, jumping around in time using a non-linear narrative, yet the result is a striking, if not shattering, exploration of the darkest corners of the human psyche.  Refusing to see what his wife is struggling with, late in the film Grace turns to her husband and says, “I’m right here, you just can’t see me.”  That invisibility may be what this fever dream of a film is all about, recalling the words of playwright Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman, with a frustrated wife passionately defending her long-neglected husband by reminding us, “Attention must be paid.”  The apocalyptic finale, seemingly right out of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (Offret) (1986), or Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (Le Temps du Loup) (2003), is just extraordinary, especially considering the volatile moments that led us there, where you see an entire forest catching fire within seconds, images of extraordinary intensity that we also see briefly over the opening credits, becoming a spectacular composition of her inner spirit bursting into flames, audaciously heading butt naked into the eye of the storm, where she couldn’t be more exposed and vulnerable.  Yet there is no hesitation, which may as well be the mindset of the director, as this couldn’t be a more fearlessly liberating style of cinema, using catastrophic imagery on the screen to delineate the catastrophe happening within, with the voice of an unaccompanied Ramsay (recorded on an iPhone) heard quietly singing the post-punk Joy Division song “Love Will Tear Us Apart” Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart, 1995 Remastered ... YouTube (3:38) over the end credits, a band whose lead singer, Ian Curtis, also battled depression, beautifully expressing the brash, in-your-face punkish style of this rare and exceptional director. 

The Eternal Daughter

 

THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER         B                                                                                   Great Britain  USA  (96 mi)  2022  d: Joana Hogg

I have a husband I neglect completely and I don’t have that much time left, and I don’t have a family beyond you.  I don’t have any children, I’m not going to have anybody to fuss over me when I’m your age.                                                                                                                        —Julie Harte talking to her mother Rosalind (both played by Tilda Swinton)

“No one wants to talk about mortality, and I regret to this day that I was never able to have that conversation with my mother,” Hogg confesses. “I was too fearful of it … I didn’t want to upset her by bringing it up.  But it would have been on her mind, and it would have maybe been a relief to have a conversation about it.  But it just didn’t happen.” (No One Wants to Talk About Mortality - The Atlantic).  From the maker of The Souvenir (2019) and THE SOUVENIR Part II (2021), with Tilda Swinton taking on a more grownup version of the role her daughter Honor Swinton Byrne played in those films, a fictionalized version of the director herself, with Tilda playing the mother, while this one features Tilda in both roles, playing mother and daughter, where you get to watch Tilda Swinton talk to Tilda Swinton in what amounts to a one-woman show.  Hogg collaborated with Swinton on her 1986 short graduation thesis film, Caprice, having known her since they were both ten year old boarding school students at the West Heath Girls’ School in 1971, the former boarding school of Princess Diana, while Hogg is also the godmother of Swinton’s daughter, each mentored by artist, poet, and filmmaker Derek Jarman, loaning Hogg her very first Super 8 camera which she used to make that first short film, only to collaborate again with Swinton on The Souvenir films, with this viewed as a finalizing coda, blurring the line between fiction and memoir.  This becomes a self-reflective memory piece on family and the limits of artistry, as sometimes the process of creating art trespasses into the personal and may have an unintended consequence, exposing family secrets that when released publicly take on a whole other life, creating open wounds that may never heal.  Martin Scorsese is an executive producer on all three films, where there is a printed conversation between them when this film was released, MARTIN SCORSESE AND JOANNA HOGG IN ....  Essentially a two woman film, with Swinton in both roles, this defies audience expectations, creating something minimalist, yet immediately recognizable, as it looks like something we’ve seen before, resembling the Gothic imagination of Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), but without the nastiness.  In fact, the two women couldn’t be more polite, which has a way of smoothing over the rough edges, but the atmospheric surroundings constantly remind us of something deeply unsettling.  With a dark and moody opening, a car arrives in the darkness, as if immersing viewers onto the foggy moors of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (Arnold) (2011), resembling the somnambulistic quality of a Guy Maddin film, as it has that same neon green color scheme and melodramatic yet overly somber musical score, which happens to be Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, Béla Bartók - Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, I YouTube (9:02), part of the background music used in Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), though the two films use different parts of it.  Yet it’s a haunted house movie, told in the old Gothic style, with a minimum of characters onscreen, mostly a woman and her elderly mother along with their dog (Tilda Swinton’s own Springer Spaniel), where they are seemingly the only guests staying at this old gargoyle-covered countryside hotel that seems tucked under bare trees in a foreboding landscape of dim lights and everpresent fog.  Shot during the isolation of the Covid pandemic on Super 16mm by Ed Rutherford, who also shot two of her earlier works, actually filmed at Soughton Hall in Wales, a 15-bedroom Georgian estate built in 1714 which has never been used in cinema before, though judging by all the peripheral noises and an everpresent camera exploring all the nooks and crannies, this eerily empty hotel appears to be haunted, as if something is constantly lurking nearby, where the omnipresent fog raises certain expectations, creating an environment that overwhelms so completely that it amounts to a character of its own.  But this is simply the framework of a story Hogg wishes to tell, which may be her most personal effort yet, but it’s concealed within a claustrophobic environment that is as telling as anything the characters have to say, literally sweeping viewers into this cacophony of discordant sounds and ominous imagery that is always shrouded in darkness, where the bottom line is that memories haunt us, creating a unique experience that couldn’t be more eerie and ominous, as if plunging us into the depths of the subconscious, out of which emanates a film about loss or impending loss, and an exploration of grief.    

Not much actually happens in this film, requiring a great deal of patience, offering only the barest outlines of a story, and much of that is filled with benevolently perfunctory conversations between mother and daughter, where you really have to dig deep to find meaningful material here, as so much of it plays out on the surface level, leaving plenty to the imagination, yet what’s unseen seems to haunt the living.  Julie is a middle-aged filmmaker taking her elderly mother Rosalind to Wales for her birthday (the same characters in The Souvenir), booking several days in an isolated old manor, a place her mother used to frequent, as it was once owned by her Aunt Jocelyn, spending plenty of her childhood there during an evacuation from the war while attempting to escape the bombs targeting nearby Liverpool, revisiting it many times even as a young woman.  But like many of these old homes in postwar Britain, due to taxes and increased expenses, they’ve been converted to country hotels, and while they promise peace and quiet in the comforts of the countryside, they immediately feel anxious when the chilly desk clerk, Carly Sophia-Davies, has no record of their reservation, or their request for a specific room overlooking the garden, instead she seems completely indifferent, having difficulty finding any available room, claiming the hotel is full of guests, even though they seem to be the only ones there.  Having the dining room to themselves, and the full run of the place, the clerk is equally disinterested about Julie’s request to close the windows and shutters in the rooms above them that seem to be continually banging from the wind, keeping her up all night, as she roams the empty corridors, with the clerk claiming none of the other guests have complained.  Immediately we question our perception of reality, as there’s obviously something going on behind the scenes, with the deadpan clerk absurdly adding a bit of levity to an overly somber film, as she seems constantly annoyed and reluctant to accommodate any of Julie’s requests, caught up, apparently, in her own personal struggles, occasionally seen arguing with a partner that is picking her up in a red sports car with the techno music cranked up as they are leaving the grounds.  While she brought her mother to an old familiar place in hopes it would trigger her memories for the film she wants to make, with each room reminding Rosalind of personal anecdotes she would never have thought of otherwise, she hopes to memorialize her mother before she dies by secretly recording their conversations.  Feeling guilty that this is done without asking consent, Rosalind is reluctant to share, finding herself easily distracted, not really providing the answers she is looking for, carrying a white plastic bag of letters and photographs that she intends to go through, while Julie spends her time working in the attic, the only place with a reliable Wi-Fi signal, making no headway at all on writing a screenplay, obscured by her own challenges, as she’s continually kept up all night, left ruminating on questions swirling in her head about the ghostly events that surround her in a lonely hotel without guests, becoming a film about the creative process and the emotional turmoil it involves.  Much of this is shot through mirror reflections, or long shots down empty hallways, with a spectral figure seen peering through the window, where it’s more suggestive than real, offering various versions of the self, never really addressing any of Rosalind’s concerns openly, as memories aren’t always clear and concise, and can feel muddled, as if lost in a haze, with only moments of clarity.  Nonetheless, Julie only wishes for her mother’s happiness, growing deeply distressed when she learns of so many sorrowful recollections, with memories of war and tragic loss, including a miscarriage, leaving her filled with regret, unaware of the heavy weight she’s been carrying, which may explain her writer’s block, growing deeply uncomfortable, a manifestation of something a younger version of her character Julie says in SOUVENIR II, “I don’t want to see life as it was.  I want to see life as I imagine it to be.”  Filtering someone else’s life through our own existential prism, it only accentuates what we don’t know or understand about those we love, as reality often conflicts with our ideas of the truth.             

While this film made plenty of Best of the Year lists, listed at #3 by Reverse Shot, Best Films of 2022 Reverse Shot, and #5 by the Film Comment poll, Film Comment Announces 2022 Best-of-Year Lists, it’s not an easy watch, particularly finding something substantive out of it, as it definitely loses something if not seen in theaters, where it might otherwise feel overly dark, with so much hidden underneath the tapestry of spooky images, borrowing heavily from the British horror tradition, including Jacques Tourneur’s fog-shrouded NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957), Jack Clayton’s superb adaptation of the Henry James ghost story The Turn of the Screw in The Innocents (1961), Herbert Wise’s ghost story THE WOMAN IN BLACK (1989), and of course Stanley Kubrick’s haunted house thriller THE SHINING (1980), which was shot in England.  The use of horror recalls the deeply buried resentments in Ingmar Bergman’s Bergman, Two from the 70's: Autumn Sonata (Höstsonaten) (1978), featuring Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann as mother and daughter, veering into shockingly unexpected emotional outbursts, while this is a portrait of Hogg’s relationship with her own mother, who died while she was editing the film, leaving her plagued by guilt, associating the film with her death, making this her version of Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015).  Essentially a film about women whose problems manifest as failures of expression, suppressed desires, and thwarted ambitions, the idea began back in 2008 when Hogg was planning a film about her relationship with her mother, but she was too close at the time, unnerved by the idea of poking around exploring very painful memories, but the passage of time allowed her to consider a different way of approaching the subject, knowing she would make a film about it one day, recalling “We often went on trips together to stay at hotels, sometimes near relatives, and so it was very directly taken from that experience with her.”  Swinton is understated throughout, providing the needed believability in each character, a stabilizing force in stark contrast to the impressionistic maze of Gothic horror that is a constant visual motif, with suggestions of a supernatural presence hovering nearby, which may be a metaphor for death, and while nothing jumps out of the dark striking fear in anyone’s heart, the horror of memory is everpresent here.  While Julie tries her best to care for her mother, she is shocked at her mother’s reactions to a return to what was a family estate, flooding her memories with an overwhelming rush of sad emotions, leaving Julie disheartened, wondering what she’s done bringing her there, but her mother is more firmly grounded, reminding her daughter, “That’s what rooms do.  They hold these stories.”  From an imagination perspective, this film is wonderfully impressionistic, offering fleeting memories, but also long-forgotten correspondences, worn-out paperbacks, long walks with the dog, and formal dining in an empty room, with only four things on the menu, catered to by the disinterested desk clerk who always seems to intrude at the exact wrong moment, invariably interrupting their train of thought, though they always insist they are having a “very lovely time,” leaving things in a state of paralysis, as if stuck in time.  The birthday dinner itself is surreal, with Julie meticulously wanting things done a certain way, becoming anxiously exact, but when the moment arrives the film swerves in a different direction, altering the look of reality, challenging our perceptions, and infusing a different understanding of the mother/daughter relationship which is at the heart of the film.  It’s clear that you can know someone without really knowing them, as evidenced by this family home that was once filled with importance and life, but transformed over time to an empty vessel, a decaying remnant of what it once was, where the physical space of the building is a ghostly presence.  Looking upon our pasts, and the people that matter to us, an emotional chasm exists between how we remember the past and the present, with all its complications.  Memory is fluid, as it comes and goes, never straightforward, which may explain the multiple shots of mirror reflections, working with more close-ups, allowing the characters’ reactions to be observed in greater detail, adding an existential element, and a different version of autobiographical filmmaking, as there’s something unknowable about this hotel and its inhabitants, and a tremendous gulf between the conversations we would like to have with our mothers and daughters, and the ones we actually end up having.