91 min | PG-13 | January 26, 2024 | Oscilloscope Laboratories
Daisy Ridley disappears into a quiet office worker who fantasizes about death. A tiny, precise film about the terror of human connection.
Fran works in an office in a small Oregon town. She eats lunch alone. She attends retirement parties and stands at the edge of conversations. She fantasizes about dying. Not violently. Not dramatically. She imagines herself lying in the woods, decomposing quietly, returning to nature. The fantasies are not suicidal ideation. They are the only vivid thing in her interior life. Then a new coworker named Robert arrives and makes her laugh and the film becomes about whether Fran can survive being known by another person.
Daisy Ridley plays Fran with radical stillness. This is as far from Rey as a performance can get. Ridley strips away every defense and every charm and plays a woman who has made herself invisible as a survival strategy. The performance is brave and specific. Dave Merheje plays Robert with gentle persistence. He is interested in Fran without being aggressive about it. Their scenes together have the tension of two people who might connect and the dread that connection brings. Meg Stalter and Parvesh Cheena play office coworkers with the casual friendliness that Fran cannot access.
Rachel Lambert directs with restraint that matches her protagonist. The film is quiet in a way that most American independent films only pretend to be. The Oregon setting is overcast and muted. The office is beige. The framing isolates Fran in every shot. The fantasy sequences intrude with a visual poetry that contrasts sharply with the mundane world. The score is minimal. The film trusts silence.
This is a film about the gap between wanting to be alive and knowing how to do it. Fran’s death fantasies are not the problem. They are the symptom. The film understands that loneliness is not romantic and connection is not a cure. It is a risk. Lambert makes a film that respects that risk and does not promise it will pay off.