There are only so many ways to observe the unfulfilling nature of office work. The tone of Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying is one of wry disenchantment, and one would be forgiven for wanting this subdued, melancholic dramedy to find a new one after its opening stretch. The frivolous small talk, insincere pep talks, soul crushingly anonymous workspaces—that this milieu can be depressing is certainly no revelation. Eventually, though, the film reveals itself not as just another tale of the alienating effects of computer spreadsheets and email inboxes, but as a heartwarming story about reconnecting to the world.
Daisy Ridley plays the perpetually neutral-faced Fran, a mousy white-collar worker in a small town in the Pacific Northwest who, as the title announces, sometimes daydreams about dying. Sometimes I Think About Dying, co-written by Stefanie Abel Horowitz, Kevin Armento, and Katy Wright-Mead, is based on Horowitz’s eponymous 2019 short film, which in turn was based on Armento’s play Killers. Dispatching with the first-person narration of the short, Lambert’s film instead gives us deeper and longer glimpses at Fran’s fantasies of being splayed out lifelessly under a forest canopy or in front of a bonfire on the beach. Lambert stages these with the perverse mix of horror and attraction that they hold for Fran, tracking slowly in on the meticulously arranged mise-en-scène of the young woman’s morbid imagination.
A recurring scenario is that of Fran hanging from the crane that she glimpses every day through a window at work, lifting her both out of the office and out of this life. Though, as we learn later, Fran actually likes her work. She reveals this fact on a date with Robert (Dave Merheje), an affable and somewhat clueless officemate who shows a guileless interest in Fran on his first day of work. A replacement for the retiring maven of the office, Carol (Marcia DeBonis), Robert injects a modicum of chaos into the stable social ecosystem of this vaguely defined business. This includes the friendly, open way in which he engages with Fran, which stands in sharp contrast to the way that her other co-workers accommodate her apparent desire to be left alone.
The script’s eschewing of the short’s narration and limiting of dialogue to brief but poignant exchanges, makes Fran into more of an enigma, leaving the viewer searching the image for a sense of her interiority. Lambert sticks us firmly in Fran’s perception of things, with montages of empty streets under gray skies, set to a score by Dagney Morris that’s infused with all the false cheer of muzak, conveying the drabness that Fran perceives around her. The mountains that loom over the bay outside the office window vaguely suggest the natural beauty of the region, but this beauty would seem to mean little to her except as a setting for her death fantasies.
Other means of indicating Fran’s state of mind are less successful throughout Sometimes I Think About Dying. Canted, oblique angles on office interactions, not necessarily taken from Fran’s point of view, imitate her evasive gaze, a visual expression of her anomie that wears thin after a while. Nonetheless, Ridley’s muted but compelling performance captures the pathos of someone who’s usually trying her best to purge herself of any outward sign of subjectivity. Fran’s isolation makes her swing between absolute self-negation and unintentionally rude frankness in social situations: Robert is taken aback, if not entirely un-intrigued, when she baldly states that she didn’t like any part of the film they see on their first date.
It’s never entirely clear why Robert, a cinephile and easygoing guy, continues seeing the insistently quiet and often visibly uncomfortable Fran. It’s conceivable, though, that he just sees someone who needs a friend. He strikes one as the best imaginable type of, as it turns out, twice-divorced schlub. As played with deceptive and disarming simplicity by Merheje, Robert may just be a man who’s learned to stop stressing and enjoy the world and the people around him.
The screenwriters avoid providing any melodramatic explanations for Fran’s depression. It’s not her work, as she reveals to Robert on one of their dates. It’s not childhood trauma, as suggested by a comment that she makes over dinner at a party that he takes her to. Her depression doesn’t have some single source that can simply be quelled. At the party, the pair encounters a new side of their garrulous co-worker, Garrett (Parvesh Cheena), and a murder-mystery game helps Fran discover that there’s an audience for her morbid imagination. This opens up an avenue for Fran to change her perspective on life, but it’s hardly portrayed as a cure in itself.
In some ways, though, Sometimes I Think About Dying does rely on familiar conventions. A sage-like lesson delivered at just the right dramatic moment, via a chance encounter during an emotional low point, feels like an attempt to tie a neat bow on a film about messy emotions. The denouement recovers somewhat from that climactic misstep, re-establishing that depression can’t be solved by inspirational speeches alone and providing a bittersweet image of nascent healing. Lambert’s film, then, is an imperfect but affecting portrait of social isolation that captures both the pain and the warmth that comes with finally letting others in.
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