Beck & Woods | 2024 | USA

2nd watch – and on the couch with The Girl, a rare treat in our parenting era. This didn’t blow me away the first time but only because I’ve seen too many movies and it ended up being exactly what I thought it would be. Still, one enjoys the Active Ingredient of one’s medicine and in this instance it’s Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East. Never have you seen two faces do this much work – the joy, confusion, terror, anger, and sadness is masterfully rendered in so many tiny mouth movements, wrinkled eyebrows, and motionless eyeballs. It’s really pretty incredible.

I realised part of the way through that this film is a very good piece of submissable evidence in the case I’m always making that you’ll have more fun at the movies if you never assume the movie is set in “our world”. It might look like our world (a nifty trick to effortlessly make you understand the stakes, among other things) but it’s not. It’s kind of the inverse of the idea that characters do not know what genre they’re in (hence they behave irrationally in, e.g., a horror film).

It would be tempting to wonder many practical things about Hugh Grant’s character, for example, but the answers become irrelevant when you remember you can’t judge him based on the rules of our reality. Trust me, it’s better.