'Do you guys ever think about dying?’ asks Barbie’s ൲Margot Robbie to the appalled dismay of her fellow playthings. In Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying, an expansion of a 2019 short itself adapted from a 2013 play, the socially awkward Fran (Daisy Ridley) does little else: a secret obsession that swamps her imagination with suicidal ideations involving slithering pythons, car crashes, and ants crawling busily over sallow skin.
As grim as these fantasies may be, they are a lot more exciting than her bleak reality: a life spent shuffling paperwork in a shabby office sited somewhere on the Oregon coast. U💃ntil, that is, she meets Robert (Dave Merheje), an affable new colleague who makes it his mission to pop her bubble of isolation.
A Sundance indie tuned to a deliberately muted key, Lambert’s quiet romance is a symphony of uncomfor🐲table silences that requires producer/star Ridley to hide her light beneath the thickest of bushels. The movie’s charm lies in watching Fran slowly blossom under Robert’s attentive ministrations, a nervous night at the pictures (followed by pie) paving the way for a subsequent murder party at which she reveals a flair for ghoulish storytelling.
Given the short from whence it came ran a mere 12 minutes, there is🐈 a definite sense of material being extended beyond its elasticไity. Yet it’s a decent vehicle for Ridley that, like last year’s The Marsh King’s Daughter, shows she doesn’t need a galaxy far, far away to demonstrate her star (Wars) power.
Sometimes I Think About Dying is in UK cinemas from April 19 and is availabl𝓡e digitally iꦑn the US now.
