This year’s Sundance film festival, a welcome return to in-person premieres for films that often desperately need an audible response to kickstart word of mouth, has begun with a bit of a shrug. And it’s a specifically frustrating kind of shrug, the kind that comes from initial “oh maybe” enthusiasm slowly fading into “oh of course” disappointment, something many festival attendees know about all too well.
In Sometimes I Think About Dying, what might sound like Sundance 101 on paper (the title alone read as worryingly quirky), starts out as something far less twee and far more affecting. Star Wars alum Daisy Ridley plays Fran, a withdrawn, almost entirely mute, office worker whose drab days of overhearing painfully unfunny small talk (from colleagues including The White Lotus’s Brittany O’Grady and Hacks’ Megan Stalter) and eating cottage cheese alone at home for dinner are interspersed with brief thoughts of death. They’re not exactly moments of suicidal ideation but more “what ifs”. What if my car crashed or what if that crane dragged me away, an idle mind dipping into darkness.
