A frustrating watch, mostly because a couple of poor choices make this film way worse than it should be.
It probably will get nominated for best acting, and that’s well deserved, as the two leads are excellent.
A lot has been said about the first thirty minutes, and while I agree that it’s a great showcase for the director and Vanessa Kirby, it’s a scene that didn’t need to be there, let alone be thirty minutes.
Why? Well, it’s dramatically unengaging, nothing interesting or extraordinary happens until the last two minutes, and as a result it tanks the pacing of the rest of the film.
Setting that scene aside, the film quickly develops into a sufficient, albeit fairly predictable drama.
I think it would’ve been creatively more interesting to focus on the conflict of grieving internally vs our human need for blaming someone, which is only briefly explored in the scenes with Ellen Burstyn.
This whole family grievance plot has been done to death, and the film fails to find a unique angle on it.
As for the characters, they do have arcs, but it should’ve been handled more efficiently.
Dramatically, it would’ve been so much interesting to delve a little more into the characters before the thirty minute scene, so that we’d have a good sense of who these people are before they get depressed.
All in all, it feels like a film that should’ve had a few more revisions during preproduction.

4/10