117 min | R | December 9, 2022 | A24
Charlie is a 600-pound man who teaches college writing from his couch and refuses to see a doctor. His estranged daughter walks back into his life with five days left to fix everything. Brendan Fraser does the heavy lifting, and the movie knows it.
Charlie lives alone in a dim apartment and never leaves it. He teaches online writing courses with his camera off so his students cannot see him. His body is failing and he knows it. Over the course of a single week he tries to reconnect with Ellie, the daughter he abandoned years earlier. The film is about a man who has decided his own life is worthless and clings to the belief that other people are not.
Brendan Fraser plays Charlie as a man who apologizes for taking up space in every sense. He turns gratitude into a tic. Charlie thanks everyone for everything, and Fraser makes the politeness feel like a survival mechanism. Sadie Sink plays Ellie with pure contempt that never softens into easy redemption, which is the smartest choice in the film. Hong Chau plays Liz, Charlie’s friend and caretaker, as a woman enabling the thing that is killing him because she cannot bear to lose him too. Ty Simpkins plays Thomas, a young missionary whose certainty cracks the longer he sits in the room.
Darren Aronofsky directs Samuel D. Hunter’s adaptation of his own play, and the staginess is a deliberate trap. The camera stays boxed inside the apartment in a near-square aspect ratio that presses the walls in on Charlie. Rob Simonsen’s score swells under the monologues and insists on emotion the scenes have already earned, which is where the direction overreaches. The prosthetics are heavy and the makeup department builds Charlie’s body with real craft. The film keeps cutting to food the way a horror movie cuts to a knife.
The result is a powerful performance trapped inside a schematic structure. Every character functions as a stage in Charlie’s reckoning, and the play’s machinery shows through the floorboards. Aronofsky wants transcendence and reaches for it too hard, so the ending plays as a demand rather than an arrival. What survives is Fraser, who finds a real human being under the prosthetics and refuses to let Charlie be only a symbol. The movie is a vehicle, and he drives it further than it deserves to go.