Kritiken

The profundity of this affecting deconstruction of grief hinges a lot on performance and storyline, but above all, it just might be a function of meticulous shooting and directing by someone impressively stretching to grasp the undefinable.

The filmmakers take great pains not to stack the deck or overstate the couple's self-evident trauma, but watching the movie is ultimately like being one of their friends: You understand their pain on a conceptual level but can't feel it the way they do.

Meadowland is a collection of moments that coalesce into one another before evaporating, cumulatively yielding a tapestry of confusion and regret... Moreno has an eye, and more importantly a feeling, for the intangibly devastating.

The actors are all incredible. Wilde is a phenom, and Wilson is quiet, pained. (I love him.) This is my kind of movie. If you care about mid-level low-budget movies, made by people who want to take risks, and the survival of such difficult adult complex films, then this is the kind of movie to seek out and support.

Wilde's flat cheekbones and thin, hunched shoulders emphasize her vulnerability, and Reed Morano keeps us trapped in her pain with the help of a camera that cleaves so close that it sometimes shows only part of a head or body, shallow depth of field often narrowing the focus even more. Phil's pain feels far less tangible than Sarah's... and the too-predictable ending involves a somewhat labored metaphor, but the film is a credible and sensitive portrayal of crippling grief.