Director: Joanne Mitchell
Year: 2024
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: Sybil
Genre: Psychological
Plot:
Trying to deal with her long-held grief, a woman’s job working at a funeral home to ensure her secret obsession with the dead remains intact allows her to remain connected to a variety of other figures uniquely similar to her past and tries to help them while also keeping her desires hidden.
Review:
This was a rather distressing and underwhelming genre effort. What works well enough here is the insight into a fractured mindset that she displays offering the kind of tricks it does to compensate for the lack of action. Taking the route of her restrained, conservative personality that prefers to remain away from people, dealing with her personal hobbies away from others, and preferring to rely on her morbid fantasies as a means of trying to impart a way of connecting with people that she feels uncomfortable around provides a strong insight into the kind of figure she’s become over the years. Putting the backstory of not just her traumatic past but the other characters in her orbit that have just as fractured takes on reality and healing as she does, everything here takes on a fine quality of looking into the depth of a fractured and broken individual trying to make their way in life.
While this is all perfectly fine and enjoyable, it rarely makes the film come off with any kind of tone similar to a genre feature. The complexity of her condition is quite hard to see getting spelled out early on which makes everything seem really difficult to connect to for those who are tired of this type of grief-centered ploy as it doesn’t do a lot to disguise this at all. Attempting to figure out how the pieces fit together along this journey might not be an experience all will enjoy with the lack of action, grief-focused storyline that’s immensely tiring to play out once in the genre, and taking this character-study trip involving the different characters which manage to include a spectacular series of encounters in the finale which highlight the condition she has. This is matched nicely with its highly-impressive technical aspects as the filmmaking is immaculate which helps to make this one enjoyable for what it is.
Overview: **/5
An intriguing if somewhat problematic psychological genre effort, there’s enough to like here that has plenty of positives for those who appreciate this kind of feature. Those that appreciate psychological character studies or are intrigued by this type of film will want to give it a shot while those completely turned off by those factors might want to avoid this one.
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